Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Master Of None’ Season 3 On Netflix, Where Lena Waithe’s Character Becomes The Focus

Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang have taken a British approach to Master of None; that is, they make new seasons when they’re good and ready, not because Netflix or anyone else is demanding it. The third season of the Emmy-winning series bows four years after the second, and Ansari mostly steps behind the camera, letting the focus fall on Lena Waithe’s character Denise. Does the revised formula work?

MASTER OF NONE SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Quiet shots of tree branches, then the tree through the bars of a wooden fence. Then we cut to the bedroom of what looks to be a rustic farmhouse, a small stained-glass window above the bed. Two women are sleeping in it.

The Gist: Denise (Lena Waithe), a writer whom we last saw at a contentious Thanksgiving dinner with her mother and her buddy Dev (Aziz Ansari), is living a bucolic life in upstate New York with her wife Alicia (Naomi Ackie). Alicia, who had a PhD in chemistry but felt that the environment where she was working was all wrong for her, has decided to start getting into interior design, and is working in an antique shop. Denise’s first novel was successful, which allowed them to buy their smartly-appointed home, but she’s struggling to write the follow-up two years later.

In various scenes, it looks like they have a good relationship, as we see them dancing while folding laundry, doing some intense cuddling, etc. Surely, the novelty has worn off and they act like an old married couple despite both being only in their 30s. But more or less they seem OK. When Alicia is invited to join an interview Denise is having with a journalist, we find out exactly where her life is, and this unsteadiness of it is palpable in how she discusses it.

When Dev and his girlfriend Reshmi (Aysha Kala) come over for dinner, a fun night starts turning mega awkward when Dev reveals that they’re living with his parents in Queens. The digs start, about her vintage clothing obsession and his lack of acting jobs because he didn’t get hair plugs, exploding into a full-blown fight. Alicia finds out from Reshmi that she’s afraid her life won’t turn out the way she thought. Denise finds out from Dev that he’s upset that they lost touch, and he’s embarrassed that his life is in such a low rut right now.

The fight seems to affect Alicia more than Denise, which is understandable given her recent career change. A few days later, she revisits the idea of having kids with Denise. Denise wants the “dust to settle” first, but Alicia convinces her that now is the time to at least start. They ask their friend Darius (Anthony Welsh) to be the sperm donor, which he says yes to immediately. They even set up a fire and some charcuterie on the day he comes by to leave the sample. What happens after Alicia is inseminated, though, leads both she and Denise to start to question their long-term viability as a couple.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The cinematic, fly-on-the-wall quality of Master of None‘s third season, subtitled “Moments Of Love”, feel like the first two seasons, the last of which debuted four years ago. But this season’s story feels even more intimate and spontaneous-seeming than the first two, Dev-focused seasons.

Our Take: All the choices Ansari, who directed all of the third season’s episodes, makes in the first new episodes of Mater of None in four years are designed to make Denise and Alicia as boring as any other couple. And we say boring in a good way. There’s no drama, there’s nothing special going on; it’s just two people who love each other living the quiet life in farm country.

All the shots (in a 4:3 configuration) are medium or wide shots, and the camera rarely if ever moves; scenes have very few to no edits. It’s almost as if the action is happening more in the background than anything. A lot of the dialogue is either improvised or made to sound improvised. There are stretches of quiet.

Yes, it’s a bit of pretentiousness on the part of Ansari, to make us feel like this season is more of an atmospheric arthouse film than a TV show. But it’s also in place to draw us into the mundanity of Denise and Alicia, a mundanity that’s already starting to break by the end of the episode.

Given what we know of Denise, it’s heartening to think that she has longed for this kind of quiet life, where she gets to be with her wife and feed some chickens, and that she’s actually getting it. It’s Alicia who is going to be the disruptor here, looking to shake things up with a child and a new career. Denise is in the role of the clueless spouse (usually a man in a husband-wife pairing) who thinks things are going great, and is even-keeled to the point that the other spouse gets enraged by it. It’s interesting to see this kind of dynamic play out in a same-sex couple, and it’s likely part of why Ansari and Waithe decided to explore Denise’s life in season 3.

Will Denise and Alicia make it? It sure doesn’t seem that way by the end of the double-length first episode. But there are four more more episodes — ranging from 20-52 minutes — to go, and we want to see where the two of them go in their journey.

Sex and Skin: None. That’s not what this is all about, anyway.

Parting Shot: After tragedy strikes, Alicia and Denise are in their bed, below that quaint stained-glass window. Alicia is starting to doubt that she and Denise want the same things out of life, and she tells Denise in no uncertain terms.

Sleeper Star: The first episode has a pretty tiny cast, but Aysha Kala shines in the brief scenes she has as Reshmi. You can see how painful the fight with Dev was to her, and that the continuing tension between the two is wearing her down.

Most Pilot-y Line: Could we have a few less lingering shots of trees and fences and leaves? Probably. But it sure made us want to at least stay in a Hudson Valley farmhouse for a week or two.

Our Call: STREAM IT. By shifting its focus from Dev to Denise, Master Of None gives us a third season that’s fresh and poignant and makes us want to see more after its first episode. Does it trip over its own pretentiousness at times? Sure. But that’s not a deterrent for us.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Master Of None On Netflix