In her New Yorker essay “Coming This Fall,” Mindy Kaling provided some sample network pitches that routinely get picked up despite being mired in clichés. Among such gems as “Hot Serial Killer Who’s Also Sort Of Literary” and “The Abandoned Spinster Club,” she detailed a pitch for “Neurotic Sensitive Guy Is Also Super Unhappy.” It sounds familiar:
A half-hour cable comedy show about a wealthy L.A. or N.Y.C. man who makes his living doing something creative, and is miserable despite having suffered no traumas and having no immediate health problems. If he has kids, they are invoked only as impediments to his sex life. The pilot always involves a child’s birthday party with a bouncy castle, or a clown who breaks character when he’s not around the kids. Deemed brilliant and hilarious, this show usually has no jokes.
The piece ran months before either program, but she pretty much pins both Netflix’s Love and Master of None with that blurb. Her tone’s a little snarky, but she’s right, in that both programs’ comedic sensibilities fit this description, leaning away from punch lines in favor of storytelling laced with absurd or otherwise comical situations. The specificity is almost freaky; Master Of None went right for the child’s birthday party in the pilot. But one detail in particular bears further scrutiny. Kaling speaks of Los Angeles and New York interchangeably in her piece, but in actuality, the settings of these two strikingly similar shows make a world (or at least a city) of difference and can help lift them above the clichés suggested by their premises. As the driving force behind courtship and thusly the fuel powering both programs, loneliness takes different forms on opposite coasts, and elicits different responses.
The geography of each city tidily symbolizes the emotional underpinnings that guide these two shows. New York and Los Angeles both make for a canny metaphor of the individual romantic stasis that the shows’ respective leads muddle through on their paths toward self-actualization. Approximately half of all scenes in Love take place in cars, and approximately the other half take place on studio backlots. Executive producer Judd Apatow, co-creator/star Paul Rust, and co-creator Lesley Arfin made damn well sure to communicate the sense of distance that separates everything from everything else in Los Angeles, a city where anyone without a car might as well not exist. The second episode in particular highlights the laboriousness of getting from here to there, following Gus (Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) as they meet at a convenience store and set off on a rambling odyssey through the city’s sprawl, bopping from Mickey’s house to the site of her run-in with a Hare Krishna-ish New Age cult to a fast-food drive-thru to, disastrously, the residence of Gus’ ex. Most of their action is movement, the process of getting to a desired location.
This mirrors the turmoil that informs pretty much everything Mickey and Gus do, especially the antithetical forces that magnetize them to one another. They’re both adrift and in search of something, anything to grab on to. When the show joins Gus, he’s just suffered a pretty major setback in the split from his girlfriend, and Mickey’s in a spiral of dysfunction that appears to have commenced shortly following her exit from the birth canal. Simpatico lost souls, Mickey and Gus project what they think will fulfill them onto one another regardless of the reality of the situation; Mickey want to take refuge in Gus’ harmless stability, and Gus clearly believes Mickey’s wild streak will electrify his unsatisfying life. In actuality, as we’re shown in the devastating SLAA sequence near the close of the final episode, there’s nothing quirky or whimsical about Mickey’s flaws. L.A. is a big-ass city, and the icons pop culture has identified it with are all defined by solitude. (For a recent example, consider BoJack Horseman floating passively in his pristine swimming pool in his giant, empty house on its own giant, empty hill.) Isolation is central to the Los Angeles experience, and Mickey combats it by latching on to whatever’s at hand, whether that’s drugs, a quick lay, or the sketchy cult her ex brings her to. Gus does the same thing, just with less transparently harmful vices. He projects what he wants onto Mickey, just as he did to his previous girlfriend. He’s clingy, but not in the crazy-ex sense, more like how a drowning man clings to a life raft.
Dev, the Aziz Ansari protagonist leading Master Of None, grapples with the opposite problem. He’s not alone, he’s surrounded, though that can produce just as much despair. As underscored by the Sylvia Plath excerpt Dev reads in the season finale, he’s wracked with indecision professionally, but mostly romantically. Co-created by Ansari and Alan Yang, Master of None sees Dev go on an unending parade of dates, eventually striking up a real relationship with Rachel (Noël Wells). Through it all, he wonders if he might be missing out on something better. In a canny metaphor, Dev spends so much time researching where to get the best taco that by the time he’s rendered a decision, the truck has run out of food. Life in New York is an exercise in sensory overload; at any given moment, 10,000 different things worth doing are all taking place. Opportunity beckons from every direction, and committing to any one thing is a daunting decision. Amid the bustle of New York, Dev can’t convince himself that he’s not missing out, even if he’s got something wonderful in front of him.
And the way Dev reacts to his own relationship tsuris clarifies what really separates Love‘s L.A. from Master of None‘s New York. After his relationship with Rachel goes kaput, Dev doesn’t drown his sorrows in inebriation, or emotionless sex, or any other base crutches. His finds solace — at least, he hopes he will — in a spontaneous trip to Italy to pursue a career in pasta-making. His solution soothes the mind rather than the senses, establishing a time-honored binary between these two cities. More than simply sparse vs. crowded, L.A. and New York embody the classical division between the Dionysian and Apollonian, the hedonist and the aesthete, the emotional and the rational.
Already the stuff of a thousand stale stand-up routines, detailing the differences between America’s coastal hubs is a national pastime on par with baseball, grilling, or low-key racism. But it’s a little more complex than “New Yorkers fall into personal crisis like this, but Los Angelenos fall into personal crisis like this.” These cities have a psychological profile reflected not only in their population, but in the fictions constructed around them. Claiming that the city in which a show is set is almost like a character has been a lame cliché since at least season two of Sex and the City, but then again, clichés only form because some things tend to happen a lot. Ansari and the Love crew both have a lucid sense of place in their newest works, and engage with their settings to the extent that they’re indivisible from the overall show. For Love and Master Of None, dating misadventures are like tacos: great on either coast, but just different enough to make you want them both.
