Binge-r #243: Master of None + The Underground Railroad

Don’t Fence Me In: Naomi Ackie (Alicia) and Lena Waithe (Denise) in Master of None

MASTER OF NONE S3

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All five episodes now streaming, plus S1 + S2

Whether you see it as an audacious reboot or an opportunistic shortcut, getting a third Master of None season is unexpected. Aziz Ansari’s comedy was a signature show for Netflix with its debut season in 2015 and 2017 follow-up. The comic actor and stand-up star created an autobiographical adventure out of his New York days that found a new arthouse perspective for the romantic-comedy, one alternately cheerfully inclusive and melancholy. Ansari was non-committal about starring in a third season, and that was before his name hit the fringes of #MeToo in 2018 when a woman he went on a date with said he’d coerced her into sexual acts. Having returned to stand-up, Ansari brings back his show with a new purpose, handing the narrative to Lena Waithe’s Denise, a supporting character from previous seasons.

The second season had dedicated a terrific episode to Denise, charting her progress as a gay woman through a series of Thanksgiving family lunches where Ansari’s Dev was her supportive best friend. These new episodes, co-written by Ansari and Waithe, whose career has burgeoned in the last years, are a different proposition. Denise is now a successful author, living in upstate New York in the kind of country home once favoured by the likes of John Updike – lots of exposed beams and eventually exposed emotions. She’s married to Alicia (Naomi Ackie), a Brit who wants to start a family, and the first episode is an extended examination of their everyday lives, with Denise a decidedly quieter protagonist than Dev (who turns up for an awkward dinner alongside his new partner).

Queer Black women are underrepresented on television, especially in domestic scenes that focus on their relationships. In representation terms this is a coup, but it’s a different show than before, more a spin-off than a third season. Ansari directs the episodes with a static camera, favouring single takes over cutting – close-ups are in short supply – and generally signalling that he’s ready to add Ingmar Bergman to his pantheon of favourite filmmakers. There are some sublime moments, such as an extended scene of Denise and Alicia slow-dancing to Nina Simone. “Who knows where the time goes,” she sings, and that’s reflected in the fluctuations and changes that take hold here as the marriage is solemnly tested by stress and loss. These five episodes could have been a movie, but they’re a season. Either way it’s good, but anyone looking for a continuation of Master of None might be perplexed.

Station to Station: Thuso Mbedu (Cora Randall) in The Underground Railroad

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (Amazon Prime, all 10 episodes now streaming): Eulogistic adjectives come readily to this masterful adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize novel about a runaway slave’s journey across an alternate history American south. It probably simpler to say that it’s one of the best television series of the year, with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins using every speck and more of his considerable talent to craft an immersive experience that is shaped not just by the era’s individual and institutional brutality, but also a defiant sense of love and spiritual wonder. Traveling through states – both geographic and psychological – with the titular transport system as secret infrastructure, Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu) is recognised as a person by the camera, not just the recipient of trauma. There are brutal, scarifying sequences here, but Jenkins and his collaborators – all due praise to composer Nicholas Britell – have created something vastly more than that.

>> Further Reading: I interviewed actor Joel Edgerton for The Age/SMH about his role in The Underground Railroad, a story that underlines what went into making the show and what was at stake for Barry Jenkins and those who worked alongside him.

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021, 148 minutes) is a remarkably bad zombie heist epic starring an out of his depth Dave Bautista and featuring a panoply of bad decisions and self-defeating gambits; Two Hands (1999, 93 minutes) is the Kings Cross crime drama that helped launch the careers of Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne amidst a sardonic Australian take on the interwoven crime adventure.

New on Stan: If Foxtel’s Mare of Easttown has you craving more Kate Winslet, The Dressmaker (2015, 119 minutes) is an idiosyncratic and stylised Australian drama that casts her opposite Judy Davis; Quentin Tarantino’s bloody but close to brilliant debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992, 100 minutes) changed the course of independent cinema by turning the rituals of the heist flick into a B-movie pathology.

New on SBS on Demand: Set in Spain’s conservative rural hinterland in 1980, Marshland (2014, 101 minutes) follows a pair of police detectives sent to investigate the disappearance of teenage sisters who find themselves in an otherworldly environment of barely repressed savagery and a labyrinthine landscape and while the investigation's spooked twists and moral bankruptcy are familiar this Iberian noir has its own compelling code.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to get the verdict on Stan’s ancient Roman drama Domina and Netflix’s newly acquired Miami crime thriller StartUp.

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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 308 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 40 lists compiled here.