Master of None hit Netflix last weekend to near-universal acclaim, so Aziz Ansari is probably (deservedly) riding pretty high right now. Still, he and his creative partner Alan Yang took the time out of their busy schedules to do a Reddit AMA. Because the show appeals to the millennial audience and millennials WANT IT NOW, they were hit with tons of questions about season two. They also had plenty to say about racial representation, finding the perfect taco truck, and why Netflix was the perfect medium for the show. The whole thread is worth a look, but check out some of their best responses below.
When asked about the possibility of season two, they revealed that while nothing has been announced, they are definitely already hard at work.
We haven’t heard officially from Netflix. But Alan and I, like true Asians, have started an insane chain of ideas already. The show came out less than a week ago. We really have been inspired by the massive reaction to the show.
It was so awesome when Mindy randomly texted me: “hahahahhaahaha I am real”
Also, Gerrard, also known as Anush, improvised that. Also, everyone in our crew always would yell “PRASHANT!” during any work day after we filmed that scene.
According to Ansari and Yang, premium channels or Netflix were their only options for content reasons, but Netflix ended up being the perfect medium for their show.
We pitched only to premium spots cause we didn’t want to deal with content issues. (Example: The show opens with Rachel and I talking about jizz/precum.) On Netflix, we never had one issue with content. Also, no need to edit to commercials. Most importantly though, Netflix really believed in us and told us they wanted to go straight to series and do 10 episodes. No pilot/development process. It was a great experience. Also, I love how everyone has gotten to just see all the episodes, rather than wait nine weeks until someone can see an episode I really am proud of like “Mornings.” That ending was really hard to think of and then I thought “what would Mike Schur do?” and came up with that.
They were also given the opportunity to comment on the seamless integration of the modern technological trappings of the times, because, let’s face it: Finding the perfect taco truck is very serious business and all of your available tools should be deployed.
I spend about 75 percent of my day on Yelp researching restaurants, so that was very organic to me.
Aziz and I are both insane maximizers who never want to go to the second-best restaurant, record store, museum, or resurrected-dinosaur-themed-amusement-park.
Ansari and Yang were also given the opportunity to comment on the important work of racial representation in television, and were asked about Ansari’s character’s preference for white women. This could have been a tricky question, but Ansari handles it well.
So, cool people talking about this kind of stuff and having all the conversations about race, etc. since the show premiered. As far as Rachel (and other love interests, too), we didn’t set out to cast someone white and auditioned people of all ethnic backgrounds, and wanted to cast the person I seemed to have the best chemistry with to sell this huge relationship arc. In the end, Noel blew us away. And, for the writing, I’m pulling a lot from my own real current relationship, which is with a “white” person, so we can do interesting scenes like the scene in 109 (“Mornings”) about the parents (which many South East Asians have told me really resonated with them and they’d never seen an interracial relationship depicted this way in TV/film before), or the awkwardness of the beginning of 110.
For the others, there was Claire Danes, who is a friend and a f*cking legend in my book, so we were psyched to collaborate. And Nina Arianda just killed us with her Cartman impression.
Anyway, I’m a fan of all these conversations and there are interesting nuances in both interracial relationships and relationships between two Asian people — if we get a second season it’s definitely an interesting topic to address.
Bottom line, if we did a hundred episodes, we definitely wouldn’t have Dev date a hundred white women a la Jerry Seinfeld in the hit television comedy Seinfeld. Race and dating is an intriguing issue that Alan and I have talked about in real life. Example: Alan really did have a white girlfriend’s mom that hugged him more times in one dinner than his entire family had his whole life.
Yes, Ansari hates the term “foodie,” too.
Yeah, that’s why I hate the term “foodie,” any reasonable person I know puts thought into where they eat a meal, no one is just like “FOOD!” and goes into a random place. Give them the weird fetish-y term (I like “food bozos” and “food weirdo”).
However, possibly the best part of the entire AMA was a simple yet astute observation from Alan Yang.
I’m loving that the top answer in this entire AMA includes the beautiful phrase “jizz/precum.”
(Via Reddit)