Emmys 2017: Why Master of None should win Outstanding Comedy Series

2015 breakout Netflix series Master of None, created by Aziz Ansari, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 2016. This year, despite stiff competition in the category, it deserves to win for Outstanding Comedy Series.

The best comedies aren’t always funny.

Let’s rephrase that: The best comedies on television today are funny, certainly. But more frequently, they are bemusing, entertaining, thought-provoking, incendiary, touching, tender.

Master of None s

eason 2 is all those things and more.

Aziz Ansari’s brainchild swelled in its sophomore season, touching on the same relationships and themes established in the first season, including racism in Hollywood, sexism (and double standards) in dating, sexuality, religion, and defining one’s relationship to his or her home.

But Ansari and the rest of the Master of None cast and crew turned their focus more on the process of creating television in season 2, playing with motifs and homages to Italian cinema (thanks to the season’s first two episodes being set in Italy) and testing their audience by including two standalone episodes that do nothing to advance the plot or otherwise tie into the rest of the season.

Those episodes are “New York, I Love You” and “Thanksgiving.” The former is much like the 2008 film of the same name, following the lives of three different New Yorkers on the same day.

The latter earned Aziz and cowriter Lena Waithe an Emmy nod for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. “Thanksgiving” follows Aziz’s Dev and Waithe’s Denise through Thanksgiving Days the friends spent at Denise’s mother’s house throughout the years, culminating in Denise coming out to her family and inviting her girlfriend to dinner.

The episode is, frankly, revolutionary. Waithe became the first black woman to be nominated for a comedy writing Emmy for her work on the episode.

“We just wanted to tell this unique, cool story that we hadn’t seen before, and in doing that it liberated a lot of people, as certain people saw themselves [in it],” Waithe told IndieWire.

Like Dev’s relationship with Rachel served as a thread running through all the episodes of season 1, his friendship with and eventual pining for Francesca, an Italian woman he met attending pasta-making school in Modena, does the same in season 2.

But this time around, Dev’s relationship with Francesca allowed Ansari to take certain narrative and directing risks. For instance, in the penultimate episode, “Amarsi Un Po,” Dev pushes his friendship with Francesca, who is engaged, to the point of no return, like pulling on the thread of a sweater and risking unraveling the whole thing.

The moment Ansari risks alienating his audience completely is when he sets up a spellbinding scene wherein Dev and Francesca slow dance in his apartment during a snowstorm. The friends are clearly attracted to one another and savor being in each other’s presence, but the boundaries are as clear to see as the ring on Francesca’s finger.

Pushing on that boundary, the pair stands on opposite sides of a glass-paned door and kisses through the glass. But then Dev moves the door aside, and the spell is broken—for both Francesca and the audience.

Dev’s tortured friendship with Francesca also gave us one of the best shots of the series, not to mention in recent television memory.

After bringing Francesca to a party as his plus-one (and enjoying plenty of fine wine), the two share an Uber back to her hotel. Dev drops her off and, for the rest of the ride home—incredibly, in one shot with no cuts—Dev sinks farther into bittersweet melancholy, wracked with the realization that not only is he in love with Francesca, but that their relationship exists as nothing but a fantasy in his own mind. The whole time, Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” plays in the background, and the scene asks the audience to stay present, with no dialogue or movement, for more than three minutes.

It’s a big risk, and it pays off.

Master of None season 2 is certainly laugh-out-loud funny, such as the scene where a young Dev eats a piece of bacon after his mother tells him their Muslim religion prohibits eating pork— with Tupac’s “Only God Can Judge Me” playing in the background.

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But, moreover, it’s bittersweet, challenging, life-affirming, and beautiful in a way that its competitors (Silicon Valley, Veep, Modern Family, Atlanta, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Black-ish) aren’t quite able to touch.