Republicans and some progressive Democrats opposed the January 6-inspired measure
A $1.9 billion emergency funding bill to boost security at the US Capitol in the wake of the January 6 insurrection barely passed the House on Thursday. The measure, which would also provide additional personal security for lawmakers facing an intensifying wave of threats and harassment in Washington and their home districts, received no Republican support, and exposed fissures within the Democratic Party over the issue of increasing funding for any police force.
The bill ultimately passed on Thursday, following last-minute negotiations led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with 213 votes for the bill and 212 against.
Every voting Republican voted no on the bill, claiming that it was too much money and that there was no guarantee it would be properly spent enhancing security. Those votes followed recent statements downplaying or outright fabricating facts about the violence that transpired at the Capitol on January 6.
More strikingly, Democrats were not unified among themselves. Left-wing members of the House, including the members of the so-called Squad, broke from the party out of what could be loosely described as a defund-the-police rationale.
Democratic Reps. Cori Bush (MO), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Ayanna Pressley (MA) voted against the legislation; Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Jamaal Bowman (NY), and Rashida Tlaib (MI), voted present, which means they officially took no position.
The defection is a sign of fissures within the party over how to think about police reform and the use of force, a policy domain that has been a source of intense national debate since the protests that swept the nation last year following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
It also appears to be a carefully aimed warning shot by the Squad, illustrating that, when they’re unified, they have the ability to torpedo Democratic legislation. The Democratic party relies on a narrow majority in the House to pass every one of its bills.
Bush, Omar, and Pressley released a joint statement saying the package “pours $1.9 billion into increased police surveillance and force without addressing the underlying threats of organized and violent white supremacy, radicalization, and disinformation that led to this attack will not prevent it from happening again.”
Bowman told reporters he voted present because “there are some things about the bill that I support, like making sure our custodial staff and our cleaners have the resources they need to respond and deal with this trauma, but there are other parts of it that I don’t support, like adding more funding to police budgets.”
While Democrats have been unified on most major legislation during the opening months of the Biden administration, that unity may not hold as more complicated and polarizing policy issues come up for debate, and throw some Democratic bills into jeopardy.
Meanwhile, Republicans’ unified opposition to a nominally pro-law enforcement bill may signal — once again — a challenge to President Joe Biden’s vision of being able to unify Congress around shared values.
January 6 and its aftermath raised serious security questions
The violence and security breaches by pro-Trump rioters seeking to shut down the certification of the 2020 election results on January 6 have raised big questions about what security should look like at the US Capitol going forward.
Capitol Police were unprepared for and slow to react to thousands of demonstrators — some of whom were armed — who stormed the Capitol, destroyed property, chanted death threats, searched the halls for lawmakers, and successfully shut down the certification of the election results. Some 140 officers were injured and several people died. Experts say things could’ve gone far worse, had lawmakers not narrowly avoided the mob in a few close encounters.
The crisis in turn has precipitated massive scrutiny of the Capitol Police and created a morale problem in its ranks, which appears to have caused an uptick in resignations and retirements among rank-and-file officers.
In spite of this, Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have downplayed the threat that Capitol Police faced on January 6. This has served to both exonerate supporters of former President Donald Trump for their role in the violence on that day, and also underpinned arguments for maintaining the security status quo at the Capitol.
At a hearing on Wednesday, one Republican from Georgia said last week that some of the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were behaving as if on “a normal tourist visit” to Washington. Another likened the rioters to a “mob of misfits.” And appearing on a Fox News program on Wednesday, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson called the incursion a “peaceful protest.”
A majority of Republicans also opposed the formation of an independent commission tasked with investigating the events of the day. While 35 House Republicans broke ranks with their party on Wednesday to support the investigation, top Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, opposed such an inquiry.
This disregard for the perils that Congress members faced on January 6 comes as threats and harassment against lawmakers have been increasing. Members of Congress report that they’re increasingly being confronted in stores and while traveling, receiving threats to their families, and having private details of their lives posted online. Compared to last year, threats against federal lawmakers have more than doubled so far this year.
The nearly $2 billion bill passed Thursday is meant to address a wide variety of issues, including: back pay for overtime hours, hazard pay and retention bonuses; better equipment and training; a “new quick-reaction team that would essentially create a standing force of the D.C. National Guard,” according to Politico; fortifying the Capitol complex with movable fencing, surveillance equipment, and reinforced windows and doors; and extra security for lawmakers who have been threatened and typically are not eligible for publicly funded security.
The Squad is averse to increased police funding without reform
Without any Republican support, Democrats were able to pass the spending package, but just barely. Pelosi and other top Dems had to scramble to try to assuage the Squad’s concerns about the bill, which included, according to Politico, considerations about allocating more money to a Capitol Police force in which some officers indirectly contributed to the day’s violence through lax enforcement.
“I am tired of the fact that any time where there is a failure in our system of policing, the first response is for us to give them more money, rather than investigate the failings and hold those responsible accountable,” Omar, who voted against the bill, told The Intercept. “I’ll continue to fight for structural change that actually centers people’s safety and humanity. That applies to us here in the Capitol, as well as my constituents in Minneapolis.”
The joint statement from Omar, Bush, and Pressley expressed a broader set of concerns with the bill. Here’s a key passage:
Increasing law enforcement funds does not inherently protect or safeguard the Capitol Hill or surrounding D.C. community. In fact, this bill is being passed before we have any real investigation into the events of January 6th and the failures involved because Republicans have steadfastly obstructed the creation of a January 6th commission.
The bill also does far too little to address the unspeakable trauma of the countless officers, staff, and support workers who were on site that day – dedicating fifty times more money to the creation of a ‘quick reaction force’ than it does to counseling. We cannot support this increased funding while many of our communities continue to face police brutality while marching in the streets, and while questions about the disparate response between insurrectionists and those protesting in defense of Black lives go unanswered.
Ultimately, Pelosi’s Democratic caucus emerged with the bill they wanted because three members of the Squad decided to vote “present” rather than oppose it.
But the entire episode showed the progressive wing of House Democrats flexing its muscle as a voting bloc, and likely foreshadows future legislative battles to come, whether on issues tied to criminal justice or other major points of policy disagreement.
Pelosi’s 11th-hour negotiations to save the bill also suggest that, with a narrow majority in the House, Democratic Party leadership cannot afford to alienate its most progressive members on any must-pass legislation — potentially offering those farther-left members more leverage on their own priorities.
And while Biden and Democratic House leadership seem to have been able to satisfy the Squad on Biden’s coronavirus relief bill and the administration’s opening gambit on a massive infrastructure bill, some rifts between the establishment and the Squad may have further-reaching consequences. For example, in light of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza, some members of the Squad introduced an unprecedented resolution to block Biden’s $735 million arms sale to Israel this week; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a similar proposal in the Senate.
While these resolutions are unlikely to get traction, they can embolden others in the party to break from Biden — as some briefly seemed to do on the weapons sale — and serve as symbols of how the small left-wing bloc in Congress could become a thorn in the side of party leadership in the coming months and years.
Let’s not swap one moral disaster for another.
Most people have heard it by now: Our meat habit is bad for the world. Polling suggests that tens of millions of people are taking this message seriously: One in four Americans said they tried to cut back on meat in the last year, and half of those cited environmental concerns as a major reason. The popular food site Epicurious recently announced they’ve stopped publishing recipes with beef in them, because of beef’s climate impacts, setting off the latest round of discussion on meat’s effects on the environment.
Cutting meat consumption is as smart an idea as advertised. Industrial farming — the source of 99 percent of the meat Americans eat — provides the world with cheap meat, but it does so at a terrible environmental and moral cost.
Where it gets complicated is when people decide which meat, exactly, they’ll be cutting back on. Often, it’s beef that loses out in that calculus. And often, the messaging is that we can save the world by switching out our beef consumption for chicken.
The problem with this message is that switching beef for chicken basically amounts to trading one moral catastrophe for another.
The environmental reasons for cutting beef from one’s diet are clear. Most of the climate impact of animal agriculture comes from raising cows for beef. Cows produce methane, a greenhouse gas that is a major contributor to global warming; it’s much more potent than carbon dioxide. Transitioning away from eating beef to eating other factory-farmed animal products undoubtedly reduces the carbon impact of a person’s diet.
But the transition away from beef can end up being a Pyrrhic victory if it drives up the world’s rapidly rising chicken consumption. That ends up swapping one disaster — the climate crisis and beef farming’s role in it — for another: the moral disaster of industrial chicken production.
To put it simply, it takes many, many more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are big, so raising one produces about 500 pounds of beef — and at the rate at which the average American eats beef, it takes about 8.5 years for one person to eat one cow. But chickens are much smaller, producing only a few pounds of meat per bird, with the average American eating about one whole chicken every two weeks. To put it another way, each year we eat about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow (and about a third of one pig).
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The choice to swap beef for chicken is further compounded by the differences in their quality of life. Cows are raised for slaughter on pastures and feedlots — enclosed spaces where they’re fed grain in preparation for slaughter. Most animal well-being experts say that the life of a cow raised for beef is punctuated by traumatic events and cut needlessly short, but it’s not ceaseless torture.
On the other hand, factory-farmed chickens — and that’s 99 percent of all chickens we eat — have an awful life from the moment they’re born to the moment they’re slaughtered. The most efficient way to raise chickens is in massive, ammonia-choked, noisy warehouses, where the birds grow so rapidly (due to genetic selection for excessive size) that their legs can’t support their weight. They live about six weeks and then are killed.
So switching from cows to chickens is a way to somewhat reduce carbon emissions — but it comes with a massive increase in animal suffering.
Choosing between the two is a knotty dilemma that tends not to be discussed often. But this tension isn’t inevitable. After all, climate advocates and animal advocates are on the same side: supporting a transition away from industrial agriculture. And most people care about both animals and the environment, so addressing factory farming is a simple win-win.
The solution to factory farming’s many harms can’t be shuffling consumers between chicken and beef depending which of their devastating impacts is on the top of our minds. And consumers shouldn’t accept as inevitable the choice between torturing animals and dramatically worsening global warming. There is a path to a food system that doesn’t force us to choose, but we’re going to need to take much bigger steps, in terms of policy and consumer choice, to get there.
The climate impacts of animal agriculture
There’s no way around it: Raising beef really is bad for the world.
About 15 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. Beef is the biggest culprit, accounting for about 65 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Cattle produce methane, and they also require lots of carbon-intensive land conversion and carbon-intensive feed. They’re about 20 times more resource-costly per calorie than veggies, and about three times more resource-costly per calorie than fish or chicken.
Beef’s defenders have argued that it doesn’t have to be that way. Proposals from feeding cattle seaweed in order to reduce their methane emissions to “regenerative farming” that can improve soil and land have been aired, and some have been implemented on a small scale.
But American consumers shouldn’t kid themselves: If you purchase beef from a grocery store shelf or in a restaurant in America, unless you go very far out of your way to trace, source, and verify the sustainable history of that meat, you’re getting the product of a carbon-intensive industrial process.
Epicurious nodded to this reality in its announcement that it would stop publishing beef recipes: “We know that some people might assume that this decision signals some sort of vendetta against cows — or the people who eat them. But this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!). Instead, our shift is solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders. We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet.”
A May 20 article in the New York Times about the rise of “climatarians” underscored the emerging primacy of climate in people’s dietary choices, noting that climate-conscious eaters have moved in a meatless direction, but that many still believe that “chicken or lamb are much better choices than beef.”
It’s entirely understandable that some consumers have decided it’s time to move away from beef. And yes, individual consumer decisions do matter: Researchers have studied what’s called the elasticity of supply for meat — that is, how much consumer demand affects production — and determined that when consumers demand fewer hamburgers, fewer cows are raised.
But whether that’s, on the whole, a good thing depends a lot on what you choose instead.
The animal-cruelty angle
It’s no fun to be a cow on a factory farm. But animal welfare experts agree: Being a chicken is much worse.
That’s because of the commercial incentives behind both cow and chicken production. Ranchers have found it most efficient to raise cows outdoors on pasture and then fatten them for slaughter on feedlots. There’s a lot wrong with how we raise them — cows are painfully dehorned, mass distribution of antibiotics keeps them healthy at the expense of breeding antibiotic resistance, and while there’s a federal law that requires pigs and cattle to be rendered unconscious prior to slaughter, it’s not always followed and only minimally enforced.
But chickens have it much worse. The cheapest way to raise chickens is in massive, crowded indoor warehouses where they never see the sun. Over time, companies have bred chickens to grow so fast their joints fail as they reach full size. Observational studies suggest they spend much of their time sitting still, in too much pain to move.
“In most cases, they suffer far more than beef cattle, who have more legal protections, suffer fewer health problems, and are generally less intensively confined,” Leah Garces, the president of Mercy for Animals, has argued.
And while a cow suffers and is slaughtered to produce around 500 pounds of meat, a chicken produces about four to five pounds of meat. So a switch from beef to chicken is actually a switch from a tough life for one cow to an awful life for around 100 chickens.
That’s why many advocates calling for an end to industrial farming have mixed feelings about the movement against beef. Is it right to try to save some carbon emissions by causing even more animal suffering?
And chicken is no panacea for the climate either. “Its impact on the climate only looks benign when compared with beef’s,” Garces points out. “Greenhouse gas emissions per serving of poultry are 11 times higher than those for one serving of beans, so swapping beef with chicken is akin to swapping a Hummer with a Ford F-150, not a Prius.”
Another frequently proposed option is switching to fish. But aquaculture, too, causes intense animal suffering and massive ecological consequences. There simply aren’t humane, sustainable, widely available, and cheap meats.
Giving consumers better choices
Consumers who are reconsidering their meat consumption — for the sake of animals, the planet, or both — are doing a courageous thing, and the point of observing the added complications of this choice isn’t to discourage them. Fixing our broken food system is going to require substantial policy and corporate changes, as well as consumers making better choices. The beef versus chicken conversation is part of how we get there.
But what the dilemma lays bare is that there’s no meat consumption that will save the world. Meat is one of the most popular foods, and yet building a better world is going to require inducing consumers to switch away from it — and not just switch between different categories of meat as they weigh the different environmental and moral catastrophes it causes.
That’s why some animal advocates in the last few years have switched from convincing consumers to go vegan — which can be too big of a leap for many — to advocating for plant-based meat products. These plant-based products are already difficult to distinguish from the originals, while having a lighter carbon footprint and no impact on animals. If you avoid beef by switching to plant-based meat products, you really are improving the world and improving conditions for the humans and animals that live on it.
But despite all these complications, when prominent food sites take beef out of their lineup or when Americans tell pollsters they’re trying to cut back on beef, it’s cause for optimism — even though in the short term, depending what they replace it with, it could make things worse. Our food system delivers meat cheaply at an awful price. Starting more conversations about that price and how we can mitigate it is a good thing, even if it’s a conversation a long way from a satisfying resolution.
Moments in Love is a radically progressive departure for the series — held back by its too-rigid filmmaking.
Master of None has always been about co-creator and lead actor Aziz Ansari’s enthusiasms. From his love of great food to his love of New York, the show lets him articulate his passions beautifully, through his writing, direction, and performance.
The show also wound up being a way for Ansari to demonstrate his enjoyment of classic arthouse cinema. He directed more and more episodes across its first two seasons, incorporating more classicist techniques from famed European films of the mid-20th century, and season two actually featured a shot of the Criterion editions of classic films early in its run. (Among those films was Vittorio de Sica’s famed Italian masterpiece Bicycle Thieves — and, fittingly, Master of None’s season two premiere was about Ansari’s character, Dev, having his phone stolen.)
At first blush, the show’s third season, its first new season in just over four years, would seem to go against this tendency of its (now former) star. Ansari barely appears in season three, and he’s one of just two men with roles of any prominence. The story focuses, instead, on the marriage between Denise (Lena Waithe), a supporting character in the first two seasons, and new character Alicia (Naomi Ackie). Over the course of the season’s five episodes (which range from 20 minutes to 55 minutes long), the two navigate relationship strife, much of which stems from attempts to have a baby, first via artificial insemination and later via IVF.
I want to say here that this season is very intentionally not a comedy. I think I laughed once. Master of None was never a laugh-a-second show, but it did have jokes throughout its first two seasons. These five episodes peer into some very difficult moments in two women’s lives; as such, even when the tone is lighter, there are almost no intentional jokes. For me, that was fine. Your mileage may vary.
In theory, as a queer woman who’s exploring options to have a baby with her wife, when both of us are well past our years of peak fertility, I should be an easy mark for this narrative. But I felt constantly distanced from Master of None’s third season — which is technically called Master of None Presents Moments in Love, but good luck getting people to call it anything other than “season three” — and the reasons for that distancing largely boil down to Ansari’s direction.
Master of None’s visual aesthetic is too often at odds with the story it’s telling
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Courtesy of Netflix
Ansari directed all five episodes, all of which he also co-wrote with Waithe. His direction of the season consists of static wide shots, only cutting in for an extreme, intimate close-up at a key emotional moment. The frames are perfectly composed, each and every element within them placed with exactitude. Ansari holds these shots for long periods of time, letting his camera stay fixed while his actors move into and out of the frame, rather than, say, following Denise when she goes into the kitchen from the dining room. We’ll hear her voice from off-camera instead.
(Here is where I will note that Ansari was accused in early 2018 of being too sexually forward on a date. Ansari said he thought what happened on the date was consensual; the woman accusing him did not. As Me Too-spurred allegations against famous men went, the one against Ansari was comparatively mild, but it’s easy to wonder if the allegations spurred him to work more behind the scenes on Master of None’s third season. Yet back when season two launched in spring 2017, Ansari was already saying that he thought season three would take years to arrive, so a long gap between seasons was always planned. Season three’s stripped-down story was further affected from being produced during the Covid-19 pandemic.)
Because Ansari shoots Moments in Love in a narrower, slightly boxier aspect ratio than we’re used to seeing on modern television — a 4:3 aspect ratio, which was dominant for most of the medium’s history, up until widescreen TVs became more prevalent in the 2000s — scenes often look a little crowded, especially when there are more than two people in them (and, honestly, sometimes when there are only two people in them).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, and at times, Moments in Love benefits from it. But the overall effect holds viewers at arm’s length throughout the season’s 4.5-hour running time, and that works to Master of None’s detriment.
It took me a bit to figure out what Ansari’s direction was nodding toward most often, but after rewatching several key sequences, I realized the director is paying homage to Scenes From a Marriage, a 1973 TV miniseries from the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. (Scenes From a Marriage was re-edited into a shorter feature film version for its initial release in the US in 1974; both versions are now available via Criterion.) Moments in Love has a similar aspect ratio as Scenes From a Marriage, and both projects rely on static shots held for long lengths of time, as the actors move within those shots.
Bergman is not the only great director to have used a “fly on the wall” approach to telling a realistic story, but Ansari seems to have Scenes From a Marriage in mind when filming, say, Denise and Alicia in bed together. Bergman’s detachment from his central married couple in that film reflected both their distance from each other (because the camera was so far away) and how trapped they felt (because of the slightly more confining shape of the frame). But as you’ll see in this scene, Bergman would cut in for close-ups on his actors when they were feeling particularly passionate. Ansari doesn’t do this.
On the one hand, Moments in Love’s overall approach, beyond its visuals, is a radical one, and it shows the hand of Waithe both at the writing and at the performance stage. Taking the work of Bergman — one of the greatest directors of the Western canon, but whose work was only ever subtextually queer and was always about people of European descent — and transforming his ideas so that they now center a Black queer couple is transgressive on at least some level. What does a story about the ups and downs of a marriage mean when you make it about two Black women? What stays the same, and what changes, if anything?
Automatically, the process of having a baby becomes more fraught, and some of the best sequences of Moments in Love are about the difficulties of pursuing fertility treatments as a lesbian couple. In a perhaps too-didactic scene, a doctor informs Alicia that there just isn’t an insurance code for a lesbian couple (or a single woman) to have a child via IVF in the same way there is for a straight couple. It’s the kind of quietly devastating moment that Ansari’s direction was designed to capture perfectly, and it feels clearly informed by Waithe, a lesbian, telling this particular story.
The season’s fourth episode — which is all about the ups and downs of fertility care — is its best single installment, and it honestly might stand on its own for the curious. When the camera enters the operating room for embryo transplants or egg harvesting, the cool, clinically detached approach that Ansari favors feels as if it dissociates from the characters entirely, to the scene’s benefit. In order to become pregnant this way, a certain distance from the body must occur.
But the season struck me as too artistically conservative in many places. In particular, Moments in Love requires you to be all in on Denise and Alicia’s marriage early on for the later strife they face throughout the fertility treatment process to land. But pulling the camera back from them as a default and placing them within a narrow, boxy frame creates the subconscious sense that they’re already trapped in their relationship. We’re longing for them to escape it long before we should be.
Again, this “fly on the wall” style can be effective. The way the series uses the house Denise and Alicia share as a symbol of the state of their relationship at any given time is wonderfully effective (pay attention to scenes where the two do laundry), and the series’ only significant close-up is tremendous when it finally arrives. It packs a wallop.
Maybe we are supposed to think Denise and Alicia are trapped from frame one. Yet if that’s the case, I’m not sure this series knows what they’re trapped by.
Master of None tries to escape the aesthetics of affluence in season three, but it doesn’t go far enough
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Courtesy of Netflix
Broadly speaking, Master of None belongs to a TV comedy subgenre we might call the “short film sitcom.” The core idea of this type of series means that every episode is its own short film, often centered on the perspective of a singular auteur, who often directs, writes, and stars in the series. Examples would include FX’s Louie and Atlanta and HBO’s Girls and Insecure, but there are many more than just those few. (Remember TV Land’s The Jim Gaffigan Show?)
Central to many of these series is an idea that the characters don’t particularly have to worry about money. Girls may have opened with a scene where Hannah’s parents told her she could no longer rely on them to fund her adventures, but she had parents who funded her adventures. Sam Fox on FX’s Better Things stresses about money sometimes, but she also owns a house in Los Angeles and works intermittently as an actor. Money is a fleeting concern in these shows, not a constant one.
Not every show in this format can be so blasé about economic matters. Atlanta is one of the best TV series ever made about the ways that people in poverty organize their lives to stretch every last dollar they have (and about the horrible structures that keep impoverished people impoverished). But typically, this style of storytelling carries within it an assumption of wealth and power and privilege.
Yet the fact remains: Not having to constantly worry about money is a privilege, and the short-film sitcom, whose stylistic roots lie in highbrow film comedies that center on characters who spend most of their time pursuing pure aesthetic pleasures and pondering the deeper mysteries of the universe, is too often rooted in that privilege. There is nothing wrong with telling a story focused on these issues. Many great films and TV shows tackle characters who are economically comfortable.
Yet Moments in Love seems, fitfully, to want to look at this question of economic privilege. An assumption of economic comfort certainly animated the first two seasons of Master of None. The characters’ affluence, particularly in season two, was mostly presented matter of factly. Though the show was able to step outside the affluent bubble of its central character, its portrayal of New York could never quite leave the perspective of the people paying service-industry employees; it failed to explore the perspective of the service-industry employees themselves, even when it explicitly tried. (To its credit, Master of None tries much harder to shift its economic perspective than other comparable shows, as Andrew Karpan at Film School Rejects points out.)
In its early going, Moments in Love has the same vague “lifestyles section of the New York Times” visual aesthetic of Master of None’s other two seasons. The house Denise and Alicia share is almost aggressively cozy, and it feels isolated from the rest of the world, like the couple lives inside of Taylor Swift’s photoshoot for her cottagecore album folklore. In later episodes, the series complicates its own affluent coziness, and we do learn that some characters from the first two seasons are having economic troubles. Master of None is interested in the ways that its characters’ blinkered perspectives shift with their economic rise and fall, and its examinations of how expensive it is to pursue IVF treatments help to ground this consideration.
But no matter how much Master of None explores questions about the way its characters’ access to wealth (or their lack of access) paints their view of the world, it is unwilling to push too far. The season finale still features a lengthy vacation that suggests the characters remain fairly well off when all is said and done.
If we’re meant, on some level, to see Denise and Alicia as imprisoned by their circumstances in those early episodes but also to see them as being deeply in love (at least for a little while), then the obvious question is what is holding them in place. The series feints toward the idea that it’s financial and social success — that Denise and Alicia are so unable to imagine a life outside of the one we see early in the season that they make choices out of a fear of losing it, but that doesn’t track with much of what actually happens in the season.
Instead, what imprisons Denise and Alicia is a question that Master of None doesn’t really bother to consider: Why?
Many of us who are queer in America in 2021 are actively considering all of the ways in which the cisheteronormative ideals that most pop culture indulges in blind us to the ways in which those systems are not necessarily the way things have to be.
Master of None builds Moments in Love atop the assumption that the happiest life for Denise and Alicia is one of monogamous bliss in a beautiful cabin in the woods, and that having a baby might very well add to that bliss (though on that question, at least, Denise and Alicia don’t immediately agree). But what if it isn’t? What if there are other ways to organize a life, to raise a child, to consider oneself successful? Moments in Love flirts with those questions, but it never really engages with them, because it ultimately can’t think of another way to see the world. The tight frames of this season don’t imprison the characters. They imprison the show itself.
Master of None Presents Moments in Love (phew) debuts Sunday, May 23 on Netflix. It’s five episodes long and around 4.5 hours in running time.
Correction: In the season two premiere of Master of None, Dev has his phone stolen, not his bicycle. The article has been updated.
For more on Master of None season three, listen to Peter Kafka’s conversation with co-creator Alan Yang on the Recode Media podcast.