Q&A: Master of None’s Aziz Ansari on ‘ethnic’ casting, Netflix & making revolutionary TV

On my ‘to watch’ list:

Launched on Netflix two weeks ago, Master of None has already been become one of the most talked-about shows of the year. It’s been hailed as the show that aging Millennials have been waiting for, the show that put an end to the last acceptable ethnic cliché, a show that subverts masculinity, and a food-stuffed triumph; it’s the new Louie, the new Sex and the City. Aziz Ansari, the co-creator, co-writer and co-director of this mult-headed Hydra of amazingness,spoke to Sarmishta Subramanian about how he and his co-creator, Alan Yang, did it.

Reviews of your show have been ecstatic. People have really responded to it. Why do you think that is?

It’s making a narrative of our comedic viewpoint. Master of None is really me and Alan’s perspective, and I guess it resonated with a lot of people.

For me, as an Indian, it was like watching Indians on television for the first time. It was a revelation. Have you heard that from other people? 

That was a point of the show. Me being Indian and him being Taiwanese, we could finally do an episode like “Parents” [which tells the backstory of the parents of Ansari’s character, and stars the actor’s parents] or “Indians on TV.” We were in a place that was so creatively friendly like Netflix; we also had the experience to tell a story like that, to get it right. What other show would have the impetus to do an “Indians on TV” episode? None, really.

It’s partly the specificity of it that’s ground-breaking. You never really see a Bengali or a Malayali or someone from Tamilnadu; it’s just “Indians.”

Yeah, that’s what I love. There are little things I’ve seen so many people respond to, such as my dad saying poda or ayyo or talking about pappadums, these little cultural things you haven’t really seen. Usually, it’s not an Indian person running the show, so there’s no one with that background to draw from.

Were you frustrated as a viewer by the generic way Indians are usually represented?

Yeah, that montage at the beginning of “Indians on TV” sums it up. But it’s not just Indian people—it’s everybody. The point with Master of None is: Everyone is an interesting, compelling person who goes beyond their ethnic background, their accent. We’re all three-dimensional characters.

A lot of times, characters of certain ethnicities are reduced to these two-dimensional, cardboard, stereotype roles, where their traits are very generic, and specifics of their ethnicities are painted with very broad strokes. It’s very insulting, and people don’t really get it right often. It’s pretty incredible that Ashton Kutcher did that brownface thing and didn’t get more flak for it. It’s pretty insane.

A big thematic point of Master of None is that there aren’t easy answers to these things and there don’t need to be. It’s more about having a conversation about it. A lot of the episodes were written with us in the writers’ room having long discussions about race or sexism or old people.

It’s not just a mix of races. In very subtle ways, the show also crosses age and class and sexual-orientation boundaries, but never in an over-the-top way. 

That’s one of the advantages of structuring the show the way we did, as opposed to a four-piece ensemble every week. The show is really about: What’s [Ansari’s character] Dev going to find himself doing this week? And which characters can we bring in to help that story? Sometimes it’s that this episode is called “Old People,” and let’s just have him hanging out with Rachel’s grandma the whole episode and you don’t see the other friends. You probably couldn’t do that on a normal show, because they’d say you’ve got to have all the friends still there. It gets annoying, because, in real life—and people have responded to this—you don’t have lunch with the same four people every day; you don’t see the same four people every weekend. People weave in and out of your life.

The casting for the show is almost—almost—over-the-top diverse. Two Indians is too many? How about an Indian guy, a Taiwanese guy, a black lesbian—

[Laughs] It wasn’t done in this way of a United Colors of Benetton ad. It was done in a very genuine way. The Brian character is based on Alan, the co-creator of the show, so he’s a proxy for him. Denise—we had an open call for that character. We told our casting person, Alison Jones, “Let’s meet with interesting people.” I read with so many women, and Lena [Waithe] was the funniest, and it just so happened she was an African-American lesbian woman, so we totally adapted the character to her. And Wareheim—Eric Wareheim—who plays Arnold, he is a good friend of mine in real life and he’s really funny.

Source: Q&A: Aziz Ansari on ‘ethnic’ casting, Netflix & making revolutionary TV