TV Recap: Master of None

The reaction to Aziz Ansari's new show Master of None has been so overwhelmingly positive, it's easy to forget that no one expected the show to be what it is. Aziz and his co-creator Alan Yang came from Parks and Rec, a lovable, single cam mockumentary. Mike Schur, one of Master's producers, worked on Parks and also Brooklyn Nine Nine, which has the same format. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix's only other half-hour comedy isn't quite that but has a similar aesthetic feel to both of those. It was safe to assume that Aziz would follow suit with his show.

The other aspect was how ubiquitous he had become as a comic. His last special, while taped at Madison Square Garden, wasn't his best to put it politely. Would the show be more of that mediocrity? But the show is a significant marker in his career. Aziz has had four hour-long specials in six years, all before he turned 32. He starred on an NBC sitcom for seven years. He wrote and starred in his own major movie. He is literally one of the most successful comics out, but he's never been considered the guy. This was a chance for him to quiet naysaysers.

The show is good. It is shot beautifully. It makes New York look so warm and welcoming in a way that no big city could ever be. I love that episodes revolve around these candid conversations, with shots of people just walking and talking. The music fits in really well. Then, of course, there are the special episodes: "Parents," "Old People," "Indians on TV." My parents are immigrants from India. I understand the emotional distance that exists within an Indian family. I'm sure that episode — and the fact that it was so early in the series — hit home for many. What separates this show from a Louie or Girls is that it views these topics in an optimistic manner. And there is a conscious decision to focus on that topic and not just Dev's relation to that topic. It's fun for me to see people of color on screen. It's fun for me to see Indian people on screen. It's cool to see an interracial romantic relationship played out on screen where one of people isn't white or black.

But this show isn't the end all be all of the minorities on TV problem. It definitely isn't the blueprint to fixing the problem. Dev has an Asian friend Brian, but Brian is really only used in the episode "Parents". Eric, the white friend, is in almost every other episode. All of Dev's romantic interests are white. The one that's not is an Asian girl that was only on the date for the free food. Outside of Aziz's mom, there are no Indian women in the show at all. It's difficult to see how this kind of thing was overlooked in the writer's room. I get that it's his show and it's semi-autobiographical, but these things do matter. There's little things too. His name is Dev Shah, which is a name that's easy for white people to say, but it would also make him Gujarati which means his family wouldn't speak Tamil. Maybe this isn't the show to establish the nuances of Indian culture to an American audience, but you don't have to brush those things to the side either, even if the show is less about the Indian American experience and more about a single dude that hangs out with friends and likes tacos.

I do appreciate the depths of the show. I've been so jaded by 30 Rock style pacing, it almost made me uncomfortable to hear the (noticeably long) pauses in conversations. Normal people don't talk like that, right? But it is funny. And it is enjoyable. Also, I need to get into acting if commercial actors really get paid enough to live in an apartment that nice.

TV Recap: Red Oaks

Amazon has an interesting collection of original video programming. They have all the money in the world but continue to fund shows that USA or TNT would air. Which in itself is not fair because most of the TV watching public loves absolute garbage TV. But as a brand name, even as a second tier, they have never come even close to the level of excitement Netflix's shows can provide. I'm not even sure how many people realize Prime shipping also happens to come with all these streamable options. There is hope for Amazon though. The Man in the High Castle pilot was really great and the full show debuts next month. And they did pay Woody Allen a lot of money, so I'm not sure he can weasel out of that agreement.

Red Oaks, like Betas, is an enjoyable show, a notch or two above that USA level. That almost sounds like a harsh critique, but, again, I liked it. In fact I watched every episode in an afternoon. The shows follows David, a rising college junior home for the summer working as a tennis instructor at a country club set in the 80s. Richard Kind plays his father. Paul Reiser plays the owner of the country club. Like Betas, it's maybe technically a comedy, but it's not a show that's focused on a jokes. It simply follows this small group of people for different days throughout the summer.

What drives the show forward are the different scenarios of boy has girlfriend A but realizes he's interested in girl B. But the show seems to be more ambitious than that. It just never actually does. In the first episode, David's dad has a heart attack and admits to David that he should have married someone else and that his wife might be a lesbian. There are some marriage counseling scenes, but it's not fully explored. So why mention it at all? Then there's the career dilemma. David's dad wants him to be an accountant but that's something he'd rather not do. Again, touched on but not much else beyond that.

At its heart, it's a bunch of kids shirking responsibilities figuring themselves out. But also, it's a bunch of white kids working at a country club. Shout out to the Indian comic from Guy Code that got a two second cameo delivering flowers.

The Carmichael Show

It's not ambitious for a trendy, young stand up comedian to get a show deal with a network and develop it into a multi-camera sitcom. It's downright cocky. Even if the reasoning is that it's nostalgic or it's what we grew up on, not only has it not worked if you pretend CBS doesn't exist for a second, it's not how we've experienced comedy on television during the last ten years. Especially not on NBC, home of The Office, 30 Rock, Community and Parks & Recreation. Jerrod Carmichael is an incredibly likable comic. There's not too much of his material out there. He's never done a late night spot or anything on Comedy Central. His debut hour that premiered on HBO last year was shot at the Comedy Store, directed by Spike Lee and was this tremendous combination of standard joke telling and awkward spontaneity. It seemed promising that he was doing a show, but you also understand how these things end up.

The Carmichael Show's first season was six episodes aired two at a time over three weeks. It initially seemed like a lot all at once, but it didn't end up being a bad thing. The show is about Jerrod, who lives with his girlfriend Maxine, his parents (David Alan Grier and Loretta Devine), his brother (Lil Rel) and his brother's ex-wife. Each episode revolves around a discussion between Jerrod and Maxine and his traditional, Southern parents. What separates this show from shows that tried to be multi-cam sitcoms (Mulaney) and multi-cam shows that don't even try (Les Moonves' filmography) is how real and heartwarming it feels. Not in an every-episode-gets-resolved-with-a-lesson way but in a manner in which the dialogue and reactions seem in the moment and uncontrived. His parents can be foolish and ridiculous but they're also parents. Their reactions to healthy diets and transgender people feel genuine and honestly funny. Grier and Devine do such a great job. Jerrod probably has some room to grow as an actor, but that works because his character is the one that's figuring things out.

You have your moments that seem a bit easy and multi-cam-y but I actually laugh at the show. It feels good to watch. It might be too much to say they tackle serious issues within it, but that's very much part of the show. How we talk about certain issues – Obama, protest, gay marriage – how a black family discusses these issues, how this family in particular resolves these issues.
Who knows where network TV goes in the next five years. Four episodes into a six-episode first season, it's hard to not root for Jerrod and company.

Sci-Fi Today: Ex Machina & Other Space

In an interview with NPR Fresh Air, Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, the Ghostbusters reboot) claimed that comedy has never really done sci-fi right. The obvious examples, Space Balls and to an extent Tim Allen's Galaxy Quest, were less works of science fiction that were funny as much as they were blatant parodies of stuff that already existed. This inspired him to create the show Other Space out now on Yahoo Screen. To Feig the show could overturn typical sci-fi tropes and in some sense explore the limits of the genre, at least in the form of a single cam comedy. 

His goals seem lofty, but the man's track record sort of allows for this. And this statement probably makes more sense in the wake of the news that he will direct the new Ghostbusters reboot. It's a story about random people fighting ghosts. Let's be honest. There's a lot of creative shit you can do with that. But Feig wrote the initial script for Other Space over 10 years ago (I'm pretty sure he said this anyway), and the only example of doing something different that he brought up in the NPR interview was that aliens didn't have to look like green monsters but that they could resemble humans. 

The show is not some Star Trek parody, but it's basically The Office (Parks & Rec might be a more appropriate comparison) in space and I mean this as the highest compliment. Other Space is very enjoyable and funny, but it's essentially a workplace comedy on a spaceship. Yes, there's a robot and an A.I., but the robot looks like it came from an 80s movie with no CGI budget. There's nothing modern at all about the sci-fi element of the show. 

This brings us to Ex Machina. The wonder in most of our favorite Sci-Fi films stems from an element of impossibility. Star Wars is set in a faraway galaxy, with different species, crazy weapons and magical powers. Terminator, Blade Runner and Back to the Future take place on Earth but in some twisted version of society. They were written during a time when personal computers were barely plausible. Ex Machina is the first film of its kind in the iPhone age that could very well take place in the present day. 

In the movie, Oscar Isaac plays Nathan, a billionaire computer scientist who has developed the most advanced artificial intelligence system known to man. Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb is invited to the research facility to test the A.I. — a robot that looks like a human woman — and decide if its behavior is indistinguishable from that of a human. If the A.I. is as advanced as possible, this means it could feel and emulate human emotion. The movie brings up all sorts of issues regarding morality, trust, deceit, sexuality and manipulation. 

While technology today is still pretty far from what's shown in the movie, it's not hard to imagine a situation like this. Machine learning and artificial intelligence today is already so impressive. Once your imagination starts to run wild, literally anything in this realm is possible. This is what sci-fi today is capable of. You can take today's technology, today's societal worries and today's political problems and flesh all that into a very real story. Not that there isn't room for Star Wars and the like, but this allows for a whole batch of ideas rooted in something modern yet familiar. Other Space is a fine show, and I hope more and more people watch it. It probably works better as it is than it would have been as some as sitcom version of Her, but at the same time, hey maybe there should be a comedy version of Black Mirror. Feig had the right idea to do sci-fi differently because the possibilities now are truly endless.

TV Recap: Betas

Not until Transparent won the Golden Globe for Best Television Comedy did Amazon ever warrant any attention for the original series it distributed through its Prime service. After a couple iterations of that pilot experiment they do, Betas was one of the first shows put to series along with Alpha House, which — and this may sound so stupid — was weird because Alpha and Beta.

Betas follows a five-person social networking startup in San Francisco. The app, itself, sets out to bring people that are glued to their phones and screens face to face, which okay, sure. The cofounders make a splash at a party at a VC's house and get a chance to work in his incubator. It's not as groundbreaking as Transparent, but it does what shows are supposed to do (and what few actually accomplish) — establish a world and offer characters viewers can feel invested in.

I can't remember the last time a show was set in San Francisco (never got into HBO's Looking), let alone filmed there. As much as there are easy stereotypes about how liberal the Bay Area is and that there are probably organic dog cafés or whatever (see recent episodes of The Mindy Project), the city is much more than that. San Francisco is incredibly diverse with different cultures, arts scenes, levels of income and sights to see. I can't say Betas focuses on the city but these elements are definitely present. It could have been interesting to see how the show dealt with the tech encroachment on those aspects of the city.

As far as the characters go, it's an accurate portrayal of the tech world, at least based on my experience. The employees of BRB are actual people and not just weirdos typing away on laptops. Hobbes (Jon Daly) is a slightly paranoid, divorceé in his late thirties in need for this latest startup to not end unfavorably. Mikki regularly pokes at her coworker's masculinities and deals with her irresponsible mother's antics. Mitchell takes Adderall and listens to rap music. Though they probably could have established that better because I'd rather never hear "cop the new Freddie Gibbs tape" again. They experience romance and anxiety and total confusion regarding the world they're in. Tech is what they do and while they are invested in this business, there's more to them than just that. As a software engineer at a startup, I must say I enjoyed that being depicted.

Ultimately there's only so many ways the main BRB storyline could have gone, and it might have been hard to stay invested in that plotline. The show's main character is also pretty annoying. A couple other issues: It seemed strange to establish a strong character like Lisa's (Tawny from Even Stevens) to have her then sleep with the main character by the second episode. I didn't really get all the stuff with the tech blogger — between this and Top Five, Hollywood clearly doesn't understand the journalism industry at all. Overall though, the show is funny. They jokes are dry and sarcastic, but there are plenty of them.

Oh, and Tyson Ritter, the lead singer of The All-American Rejects, is in the show. The fact that I recognized him is literally the most shameful moment I've had all year. But he does a nice job.

You can't discuss this show without bringing up HBO's Silicon Valley. Betas came first by about a year. Both shows showcase the different engineer stereotypes pretty well. Both include companies with absolutely awful names — BRB and Pied Piper. Silicon Valley is very much a comedy. The ridiculousness comes first in the same way it does for a show like Veep. What I appreciated about Betas was its more diverse and ethnically accurate cast. You don't see nearly any Indian and Asian representation on television. Sometimes you get one or the other but definitely not both at the same time. To have an openly gay character in Karan Soni's Nash was a very progressive moment for South Asians in TV and film.

Amazon didn't pick it up for a second season which is sort of unfortunate. I liked seeing these actors on screen together even if the show was ultimately a few notches above one you'd watch on USA. It probably wouldn't have lasted alongside Silicon Valley anyway.

TV Recap: Marry Me, Black-ish, Mulaney

Black-ish
From the announcement of the show at the top of the year, nothing good seem to be coming from Black-ish. In retrospect, it's funny how a terrible name can make you second guess everything about a television show. Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross? On ABC? That's gonna crash and burn! My goodness, this is a terrific show. It's funny. It's topical. It puts people of color on primetime television. There's cute kids and funny parents. What more could you ask for? The best part of the show, I'll repeat, is that it is just plain funny. That's all you really want from a sitcom. Forget whether it's cable or network or single cam or multi-cam. The makers of this show pulled off something many of their contemporaries struggle to get even close to.

Marry Me
Having high hopes for a show based on its cast and creators can be dangerous. Happy Endings was amazing! Casey Wilson is awesome. Ken Marino has been great in so many things. Marry Me didn't take off quite like I had hoped. But it isn't bad. The pilot is a little too cute for its own good, but these later episodes seem like they're building towards something. The cast definitely isn't as strong as the one Happy Endings had, and I like how they fulfilled their gay and black characters quota with the same actress.

Mulaney
This show is just terrible. It's not even close to good. I consider myself a fan of John Mulaney's stand up. I only really started watching SNL a few years ago, so I can't say that's a part of his career I paid any attention to. But by the time the show had been picked up, I had enough confidence in him and Fox's then president Kevin Reilly to be okay with the multi-cam setup. Fox had New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. By good sitcom standards, they were on fire. This show is bad. The writing is not good. The premise is sort of stupid. You hope it gets better as sitcoms tend to do after a trial period.

Gotham - S1E1

The idea of Fox's Gotham as an origins story for the entire Batman universe in fully serialized television formed was intriguing at first. Most of us are still pretty fresh off the high that was the Nolan movies. Marvel gave S.H.I.E.L.D. a TV show. This didn't seem like a half bad idea in comparison. Now I enjoy comic book flicks. X2, Raimi's (first two) Spiderman films and of course Nolan's trilogy are literally some of my favorite movies. And I'm familiar with the different Batman villains generally. But as I started watching the first episode of Gotham, I realized I just don't care. 

The show at its core is the story of two detectives working in a crime-ridden city in a corrupt police force. That in itself should provide for solid episodes of network TV. You add the Batman characters, and things can get more interesting. The episode starts off with the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, and obviously we've seen this before. You very quickly meet the Penguin, a young Poison Ivy and what I thought was the Riddler, but I may be mistaken. It's just not all that satisfying. Gordon is played by Mischa Barton's boyfriend from The O.C. He's fine. His partner, played by Donal Logue (who I think is great), is your typical good guy (or is he?) with problems – drinking, probably infidelity, etc. 

If you're running the show, are you trying to appeal to Batman fanatics or the people that watch dramas on Fox? I don't really fall into either of these categories. The pilot is a bit overstuffed with appearances of famous characters. While it sets up Gotham as a bad place, the police force as untrustworthy and Alfred as kind of a bitch, I don't see the show being all that entertaining. But I'll stick around for now.

TV Recap: Enlisted Season/Series Finale

It's hard for me to tell if I was so into FOX's newest sitcom Enlisted because it was in such an underdog position or if it was really that great of a show. Too many things worked against the show for it to survive another season, realistically speaking, but man, was it awesome.

The showrunner of Parks & Rec once said sitcom writers should be able write and film an entire first season, toss it out and start the show with season two. There are bumps and bruises during that introductory phase, and it takes time to establish relationships and story lines that actually make sense and are still enjoyable to the viewer. Parks, Community, even a show like Scrubs all took time to get going. It's a possible testament to Enlisted's writers learning from its predecessors, but it's amazing how quickly this show was able to do it with this diverse set of characters.

I still don't remember all the characters' names, but I still somehow felt very invested in them. It was heartwarming in the way Parks is and very real and emotional in a way Scrubs was at times, all while being laugh out loud funny. Sunday's episode – with the dance battle, the "Office and a Gentleman" bit and several misty-eyed moments – demonstrated this perfectly. It's hard to hold out hope for the future, but there's clearly more to be told regarding the folks in Rear D. And if this is the end, I'll be sad to see it go.

I don't want to like HBO's "Silicon Valley"

HBO's newest comedy "Silicon Valley" premiered this Sunday. It follows Richard Hendrix (and his buddies) as he finds himself going from mindless employee at the show's version of Google to owner of his own potentially umpteen million dollar company after creating a lossless compression algorithm.

Aside from the show's creator Mike Judge's history, the cast and a two-minute preview HBO released a few months ago, I didn't know much about the show. But I didn't want to like it. I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. My parents aren't software engineers, but I've always been around that world. I ended up going to college at UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and I now work at a company just like the people in the show.

I guess I appreciate that this world is getting some shine through the comedic lens of a guy like Mike Judge. I wouldn't compare my office to the one in Office Space, but I definitely feel like the only sane person in a room full of ridiculousness when at work. It's just that the software industry has completely blown up. There's so much money in this world that it doesn't even make any sense, and the industry has become this caricature of itself during that process. But there's so much more to life in the Valley than this. So if an outsider's only entry point into this world was The Social Network and news reports about how awesome Google's offices are, I didn't want another (likely more accessible to the average viewer) viewpoint to come from that angle. There's also several stereotypes about software engineers that I've always resented, especially while in college, and I probably took it personally that a significant HBO show could potentially portray that as the norm.

What I didn't learn until today was that Mike Judge worked as a programmer. Granted it was 30 years ago, he has more insight into what it's like to work at one of these companies than I ever thought he did. It's kind of inspiring to know that I could possibly go from what I do now to what he does now.

The pilot was okay. It was hard to not groan at the Jobs/Wozniak joke. It's also weird to watch a storyline about a guy's side project becoming a million dollar company in literally hours when I know that not only does this never happen, but also that most engineers just kind of exist without really contributing anything all that significant in the grand scheme of things. But I get it, it's a fucking TV show. I do appreciate the sort of inside jokes thrown in – about no girls being around, the absurd IPO party kind of lifestyle, the insults the guys in the house throw at each other – that reveal a deeper level of these friends' personalities. Because, in the end, the fact that the show is based here isn't what makes it funny or interesting. It's simply what drives the plot forward.

I don't see Silicon Valley catching up to Veep, which I believe to be funniest show on TV, in terms of quality, but I'll obviously continue to watch. I was never worried so much that the show would "portray us incorrectly." It was more that, if they were going to do this show, it better be good because I've forced myself to be personally invested in its reception. I'll probably write about it more here in the coming weeks.

TV Recap: Enlisted

I'm a big TV fan. I watch way more TV than most people I know, so I was shocked to find out about FOX's Enlisted for the first time last week, nine-tenths of the way through the show's first (and unfortunately last) season.

FOX had been batting well above .500 when it came to single-cam comedies, having found success with New Girl, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and (kinda/sorta) The Mindy Project. Enlisted fit right in with those other shows, and like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it found its footing as a convincing and overall funny show very quickly.

The show follows three brothers, solders assigned to the U.S. Army's rear detachment. The brothers along with the rest of the platoon make up a lovable pack of misfits that follow some typical sitcom tropes but still provide an interesting spin to the workplace comedy. It's about soldiers, but there's a nice balance of men and women and stories that include both points of view. And it doesn't just focus on the three brothers. The storylines in each episode involve most of the cast, or at least different combinations of the group, so the show is not just Michael Scott and the rest of the gang, which I appreciate.

Unfortunately, Enlisted aired at 9:30pm on Fridays. It wasn't moved there. That was its original timeslot. I'm a loser that does nothing on weekends, and even I don't watch TV on Friday nights. Last Friday the ninth and final episode, of a planned thirteen episodes, aired as FOX chose to remove it from the schedule.

On one hand, it's understandable. If you run the network, you have to get rid of something, and it's not going to be New Girl, Brooklyn or Mindy. And really, this is the type of show that gets fourth billing. It's genuinely funny but easy to not recognize amidst its network competition. Because of the low ratings, there probably wouldn't be a huge backlash at its cancellation. But the show (I just finished episode 6) really had potential. There isn't anything that separates Enlisted from Brooklyn Nine-Nine except that Andy Samberg stars in one of the shows, and its lack of star power or at least familiar faces (Chris Powell who plays the middle brother is probably the most famous for having played Piz in Veronica Mars) likely led it to the chopping block.

You could have easily placed it in Tuesday's comedy lineup and made it more significant, but for whatever reason Fox is choosing to keep faith in the middling Mindy Project. I don't know enough about how TV works to understand why a show needs to be cancelled, especially considering acclaimed sitcoms don't just fall from the sky. But I highly suggest watching the show. All episodes are currently available on Hulu, and hopefully the show finds life on Netflix or something along those lines.