The much-postponed third period of Netflix’s “Master of None” is coming next month, as indicated by a tweet from the @NetflixQueue account.
“Master of None,” made by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, has had an unusual schedule, with the first season premiering in 2015 and Season 2 returning in 2017 — and now it’s been on rest for a very long time.
The season is relied upon to be a departure for the show, and it’s believed to focus on Lena Waithe’s character, Denise. Early reports about the third season indicated that Naomi Ackie (“The End of the F***ing World”) would join the cast.
In 2017, Waithe and Ansari won an Emmy for outstanding comedy writing for the Season 2 scene “Thanksgiving,” which focused in on her character’s struggles with her family. (In its first season, “Master of None” likewise won an Emmy for writing, with Ansari and Yang sharing the honor.)
During the show’s four-year absence, Ansari was involved in a knotty #MeToo allegation, which then in itself got dubious. In a story distributed in January 2018 on the now-ancient site babe.net, a lady with the alias depicted a date with Ansari during which she felt he had been excessively forceful, and had constrained her into sex. “It really hit me that I was violated,” she told the reporter. “I felt really emotional all at once when we sat down there. That that whole experience was actually horrible.”
The story went viral, and set off a firestorm, with some arguing that its messy announcing clouded the main problems at its center about consent and dating. Others — most prominently, Bari Weiss and Caitlin Flanagan — held it up as proof of #MeToo overextend, and said the story was only an anecdote about an awful date. It got ugly.
As far as concerns Ansari, he largely dropped out of public view and moved to London. In any case, in 2019, he did a stand-up visit that was communicated as the Spike Jonze-directed Netflix extraordinary “Right Now,” in which he addressed the accusations. “There’s times I felt humiliated. There’s times I felt embarrassed. And ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.”
The responses to “Right Now” were mixed to muted. Assortment’s Caroline Framke expressed, “Ansari, both new and old, never had to apologize in order to be just fine.”
Toward the finish of “Right Now,” Ansari earnestly — whisperingly, in fact — explained the title, saying what matters in life is “the moment we’re in, and the people we’re with.”