Master Of None

We’re all going through tough times.  Some of us are still dealing with symptoms of Parks & Recreation withdrawal, even though we finished this delicious sitcom over two years ago.  How I still envy my friend who made her first watch last (after following my recommendation to take on this particular boxset in the first place) by rationing the episodes over time and taking care to watch each several times before moving onto the next one.  What we both had in common, though, was only discovering Leslie Knope and her Pawnee pals many years after the show had finished broadcasting.  Such is the power of late boxset discovery.  If we really make an effort, there’s every chance we can get through all the TV shows ever made.  Surely that’s something to cherish on the deathbed.  But, in keeping with my penchant for coming to things late, I recently spotted the two seasons of Master Of None on Netflix.  For a reason that at this point was unknown to me, this show was all the rage back when it appeared between 2015 and 2017.  Aziz Ansari was striking out on his own, leaving behind Tom Haverford whose teachings about Treat Yoself Day (nothing beats his and Donna’s mantra: fine leather goods) and hilarious expressions live on in memories I recall on a regular basis.  I recall awards buzz and maybe even awards wins that I am too lazy to look up.  Let’s be honest, you’re dying to hear what I thought, so let’s proceed.

Master Of None at first appears to be gentle viewing.  It’s amusing but doesn’t bend over backwards to provide lols.  There’s narrative tension, but it doesn’t necessarily sensationalise itself to produce drama.  Yet, you care.  And that’s because Ansari as Dev Shah is a rather likeable everyman.  A New York-based millennial reaching the point in adult life when you’ve got to ask yourself some questions about your career, your relationships and your dreams if you’re not already on the conveyor belt of generic lifestyle steps that starts with engagement and ends in babies, Dev dabbles in acting.  His real passion is saved for eating food that needs to be as delicious as possible.

The first season settles, with some wobbling, into a meandering pace, dealing in turn with such issues as parenthood, having foreign parents, ageing, dating morals (would you pursue a married lover?) and representations of Indians in the media.  There’s a universality to some of this, but the frank examination of America’s relationship with certain ethnic heritages delivers refreshing and challenge thought provocation, all while keeping within the show’s friendly style.  It’s part social comment, part whimsy.  A storyline casually emerges as Dev’s relationship with the charming Rachel (Noël Wells) progresses thanks mostly to her inability to be offended by his jokes, creating a new layer of jeopardy as we will these lovers to make it together.

Series two has a more experimental feel.  The action shifts to Italy (for pasta making), while episodes freewheel boldly with their own style.  There’s black and white, flashbacks, montages and an assembly of loosely interconnected stories that shines a light on the experience of newer New York immigrants, contrasting it against Dev’s own attitudes as someone born in the USA.  He’s as self-entitled as the child of any developed country, but this constantly has him at odds with his more pious Indian parents (played by his real-life mum and dad).  A new love story emerges, and you’ll track its star-crossing with the same anxiety you might have found elicited by Normal People.  Master Of None dares itself not to give you what you think you want.

I took to taking in my episodes in the bath, something which ramped up when I solved my heatwave woes by filling the bath with cold water and immersing myself at various points during the day when my own sweat was causing me to slip off my laptop keyboard.  Dev and his pals quickly feel like old friends, even though some of their lines can be slightly mumbled.  Every so often, we’re treated to a bit of Orange Is The New Black’s Danielle Brooks stealing scenes as Dev’s agent while Eric Wareheim’s Arnold grew on me over time despite my initial resistance.  Lena Waithe comes into her own in the Thanksgiving episode (which she wrote), offering a sensitive telling of a story we see represented all too rarely.

Master Of None doesn’t necessarily make you feel strong feelings.  It’s subtler than that.  It champions what you might otherwise miss and doesn’t care about what you’re used to seeing.  It’s playful throughout and therefore an undeniably nice watch.  It made me think and it made me feel and, if any more comes along, I’ll definitely be pressing play.

Parks & Recreation

The stages of boxset viewing are often likened to a relationship, normally an unsuccessful one.  I’ve tried to avoid that analogy throughout this blog, as it’s not really something I’ve ever experienced.  Then I watched Parks & Recreation and now I feel like a jilted lover.  But this isn’t because I let myself get into it and spent hours of my life watching it only for the quality to fall away or for the storylines to frustrate me so that I had to abandon it, never to get back the time I spent sitting through it.  This is how a lot of fans currently feel about The Walking Dead (when they should really just be hitting up Fear The Walking Dead, whose third series I’ve just binged the life out of and thoroughly fanboyed), but I guarantee that, if you are of sound mind and sound constitution, you will not feel this way about Parks & Recreation.

However, you will experience a profound emotional response as you work your way through the seven series that exist of what could be the cutest show ever to be available to stream on Amazon Prime.  The first series feels a bit like the cusp of something great, but is not great in and of itself.  In fact, I tested out the first episode a long time ago and couldn’t help feeling like someone had ripped off The Office: a mockumentary set in a workplace interspersed with pieces to camera.  I moved on with my life, convinced it wasn’t for me, and probably started watching some utter trash, such as another series of Geordie Shore.  I look back on those times with regret.  I could have been getting stuck into the shenanigans of local government employees in Pawnee, Indiana.  It was wasted time.  Geordie Shore’s cast was downgraded with the addition of Love Island rejects and I had to give it up forever (a bit like the unsuccessful relationship I was trying to make an allusion to all the way back in the introduction; you probably don’t remember it now but I’m trying to create some semblance of structure here).

But then I found myself offering it a second chance.  I needed a sub-30-minute show on the go, something to put in front of my face while I’m quickly putting food inside my face.  Too often, I was embarking on a meal with a spot of entertainment and finding myself still sat there an hour later.  The first series gave way to the second, and some cast members that weren’t really working out gave their places away to some better ones, and suddenly I was in love.

It all begins with a giant hole in the ground.  Someone falls in, their girlfriend complains to the parks and recreation department of the city council, the team spring into action to turn the hole into a park and thus ensues the storyline for the whole first series.  A whole series about a hole.  By series two, the whole hole has been wholly forgotten, to a certain extent.  Instead, each episode is at liberty to jump about poking fun at small-town America, large-town America, all forms of government and people in general.  But the poking is gentle, with no effing and jeffing (except when it’s bleeped out for hilarity) and just enough sexual innuendo to provide a bit of blue for the dads.  While a series will crescendo in an event or crisis, it’s individual (and ridiculous) occasions that mark each episode, announced in the first few seconds with someone announcing “in Pawnee, every year, we celebrate…”

The reason the plotline isn’t as crucial as it might be with other boxsets?  The characters.  Pawnee, and its department of parks and recreation, is populated by individuals who develop to be so dense and rich in their personalities, that their average working day, and all its farcical undertakings, draws you into a fascinatingly and hilariously entertaining world.  I’ll acknowledge they seem like caricatures at first, but let them mature, I say, and you will reap the rewards.  You’ll want to be their friends.  I began to miss them when several days passed without me delving into a new episode.  I began to question my career choices and started to wonder if I wanted to work with them.  I began to love them.  And when you love, you get hurt.  But more on that later.

So who are these people?  I shall tell you.  But be warned, this is just a long series of me gushing about each one, adding little to no value along the way.  Read on!

Leslie Knope

Knope is the part of you that seeps out when you have zero chill.  She adores her job, adores working for her community despite her community being full of cretins, and she adores her colleagues, who she can only view as lifelong friends.  Ask for her help and she’ll stay up all night producing a ring binder of everything she could possibly do for you, no matter the subject.  While she loves parks, she also hates libraries.  While she wants her town to be healthier, she loves waffles covered in whipped cream.  While she loves making occasions out of any obscure anniversary in any relationship in order to shower friends with deeply personal gifts, she doesn’t expect anything in return.  We should all be more Knope, though I actually like libraries.

Ron Swanson

The name says it all – an uncomplicated man.  Deeply set in his ways as a breakfast food-loving carnivore, Swanson’s journey over the series is among the most touching.  His view that the government should stay out of his life is at odds with his job in the, er, government, but it’s this conflict that lands him in so many absurd situations.  It’s his unorthodox relationship with ideological opposite Knope that proves that anyone can get along with anyone.  He also has the best and most surprising girlish giggle when things tickle him in just the right way.

Tom Haverford

Statistically, this character has caused me the most laughs out loud.  His approach to dating is straight out of a hip hop video.  He’s a grown man that whines like a child at any injury.  He is a committed consumer who places huge value in the quality of material possessions.  But he’s at his best when smiling at the camera because something has just gone his way, and that’s when I crease up at his delightful little face.

April Ludgate

Beginning her career as the department intern, Ludgate takes teen angst into adult years with a sardonic comment for every situation.  When it’s too hard to adult, Ludgate is the one that calls it out.

Andy Dwyer

Now I’m torn; I’ve also LOLled at this manchild probably just as often as I’ve chuckled my socks off at Tom Haverford.  Chris Pratt might now be a galaxy-guarding dinosaur-whisperer, but his comedic performance is on the money – timing, expressions, energy.  General face, in fact.

Jerry Gergich

Enter the office punching bag.  Jerry is actually the nicest guy around, but his accident-prone antics earn him the wrath of the others.  The play at his expense sometimes does seem to victimise him, but rest assured that later series treat him with the affection he deserves.  He also helps bring an element of fart humour into proceedings when things get too highbrow (which is actually never).  Sometimes, there is nothing funnier than watching an overweight man fall over while passing wind.  Apart from maybe Andy Dwyer.

Donna Meagle

Barely allowed to speak in early series, this character never ceases to surprise.  A throwaway comment about Ginuwine being her cousin eventually culminates in a recurring guest role for him.  This has to be commended.  She’s an enigma who doesn’t care what her colleagues think about her or what she does.  Personal favourite moment: when she bursts into a meeting room to join in with Ann Perkins trying to force April Ludgate to sing Time After Time with her.

Ann Perkins

Ann Perkins begins life as the lady who lives next to the hole, but soon Knope creates a touching best friendship out of her.  She’s often the least comedic of the characters, but her uncoolness in certain situations make her more believable, as well as her ability to bear the intensity that a Knope best friendship (obsession) entails.

Ben Wyatt

I just like it whenever Haverford bullies him for being a geek.  Also, Cones of Dunshire.

Chris Traeger

Rob Lowe as an insecure, health and fitness obsessed, incredibly energetic boss that wants everyone to like him?  Chris Traeger!

Well, that was a lot to get through and I kind of gave up by the end, but yeah, I love these guys.  I was going to make a comment about them each being a facet of my personality.  And now I just have.  They are all me.  And they are all you.  Watch them.

But wait, there’s more.  The rest of Pawnee is filled (a bit like Springfield or Quahog) with minor characters that keep coming back for more.  Swanson’s ex-wife Tammy, local douche Jean-Ralphio (who RnB sings anything contentious he has to say) and his sister Mona-Lisa, local media stars Perd Hapley and Joan Callamezzo, Lil Sebastian: just some of my favourites.  I could go into paragraphs and paragraphs explaining why they are funny and why I therefore love them.

Finally, there’s also Treat Yourself Day.  It’s a day of consumer excess when Tom and Donna hit the mall together and buy whatever they want, including fine leather goods.  Fine.  Leather.  Goods.

To recap: I have a lot of love for this show.  So why did it hurt me?  Because I finished it.  With each series I completed, I got a bit closer to the final end (the last episode went out in 2015).  Once I hit series seven, I had to ration them carefully.  Then I saw series seven was shorter and different to the others.  And then I couldn’t cope.  I had been shown what happens to the characters in the end.  There was music evoking memories from the other series (Bye Bye Lil Sebastian).  I felt I had lived through something great and that I would never have it again.  Was it worth it?  Yes.  Will I do it again?  Yes.  But that’s just how boxsets go sometimes.