Change Your Image
lacksheep
Reviews
Fixer Upper (2013)
Always the Same
The hosts are entertaining enough and they at least have some chemistry as a couple. I prefer watching this show to Flip or Flop.
The problem is every house is given the exact same treatment. They do find plenty of actually cool houses in their area, some of which are very old. They throw the word character around, and then proceed to strip the character out of every home they find, unless that character is hardwood floors. They bust down all the interior walls to make room for the massive, trendy, all-white kitchen with the white cabinets and the marble counters and the bin pulls. If there's wood trim, they paint it white. If there's brick, they paint it white. White, white white. Gray, gray, gray. Everything ends up looking like their own house.
What really annoys me most is when some unforeseen cost comes up, and they ask their clients for more money to fix it. It never occurs to them to accommodate the new problem within the budget, or to leave a cushion in the budget for unexpected costs, or to compromise on some of the renovations. Or, god forbid, to *not* gut a kitchen full of perfectly functional cabinets. A lot of the houses they fix are actually move in ready, and they do a ton of unnecessary work. They could save money by keeping some of the stuff in the house and working with it. But it's like there's a rule that the client's money has to be used up totally. If the client is willing to give them 100k, then by god they will come up with a renovation plan that costs 100k.
Master of None (2015)
It tries
Well it's not the hilarious comedy that I expected, but one of those laid-back slice-of-life things. The sentimental mood of it reminds me of movies like "Jesse and Celeste" or "Boyhood"; you know, the kind where it's all about *Life* and there's no exact plot, just events happening and people talking. The story just floats along from one situation to another. Conflicts are just bridges to cross: they come up and resolve without fanfare. It's watchable and entertaining at times, but it's not something I would want to see more than once.
Aziz Ansari's character has the flavor of his stand-up self but much more toned down, which is good: Aziz's hyperactive comedian persona is hilarious, but Dev Shah is the kind of guy you would much rather have around as a friend and probably the more tolerable lead for a show. Other than that, none of the characters seem to have their own sense of personality, and that's the biggest problem I have with the show. Everyone talks in the exact same tone with the same blithe voice having the same inane conversations and there's not much that sets them apart. Dev's group of friends don't get much screen time or development and the interactions between them end up being bland most of the time (especially with his girlfriend...good god the Nashville episode bored me to death).
Some episodes center around his race, but it doesn't actually tell us anything insightful or new about race or the Indian-American experience. There's just this quite typical tumblr-y kind of racial awareness, like "oh look, actors getting typecast because of race". OK, it's fine to build awareness of that issue, but there should also be some effort to actually explore it and pull an interesting story out of it (which I shouldn't expect, maybe, since this show is allergic to keeping a plot). There's a similar thing with the feminism episode: the situation comes out of left field, doesn't relate much to the story or characters. All it does is allow the show to 'talk' about social justice, pop-feminism style, without exploring the issue any more than a facebook post would.
Aziz Ansari is pretty clueless and condescending about India, as American-born Indians can be, and that shows through sometimes in the writing (also in the hammy set design for his father's India flashback). The name Shah is not a Tamil name (which is the first thing that any Indian would point out, so I'm assuming they didn't ask any Indians for reference). Shah might make sense if the character is supposed to be Tamil *Muslim*, but then there's the inconsistency that Dev is obviously a Hindu name. It's like writing a white Christian character named Malik: possible, but weird.
Visually and overall, you get a sense that the show is geared to appeal to millennials. The look of it is soft and polished. There are lots of out-of-focus backgrounds and night scenes filled with city lights and bokeh. It puts me in mind of a music video, especially when there is an actual montage going on. The characters have arty jobs and glamorous social lives and live in unrealistically nice apartments, but this is done in a more understated way than usual, to make it relatable (and in keeping with millennial tastes, which run eclectic). The show has this attitude that it's keeping things real and showing the real side of life, but despite that there's just something that feels engineered and fake about it.