You may know Aziz Ansari best as the man who taught you to “treat yo’ self” over the course of seven seasons on Parks And Recreation, but he also won multiple Emmys for Master Of None, the brilliant show that spent three seasons on the Netflix schedule between 2015 and 2021. Master Of None was both a critical and commercial success, marking a turning point in Ansari’s career as the industry began to take him more seriously as a writer. Now he’s moving into the world of features with his upcoming film Good Fortune.
Unsurprisingly, there are some major ways in which the new movie was inspired by the stories he was telling on Netflix all those years ago. I recently spoke with Ansari to celebrate the upcoming release of Good Fortune, and when I mentioned Master Of None, he said this:
There’s definitely some DNA in Master Of None and this, with the stuff with me and my dad. And, you know, there was an episode we did called “New York, I Love You,” where we followed people like, there’s a taxi driver, a doorman, and a woman who was deaf. And in this, it’s kind of like, you’re kind of going into a different world with Arj. A guy who’s, you know, working at a Hardware Heaven, a Home Depot-type store and doing this TaskRabbit kind of thing. So there’s kind of this kind of putting yourself in other people’s shoes element.
Aziz Ansari
Master Of None Season 2 largely centers around the lead character, Aziz Ansari’s Dev, falling in love in Italy. Packed with homages to classic Italian romance flicks, it is one of my favorite seasons of television ever made, and that’s in no small part due to the elements of the story that depart from our characters in the main continuity.
With the anthology episode Ansari mentioned, “New York, I Love You,” they took such creative risks as extended sequences in complete silence to put you right in the shoes of a deaf woman. Good Fortune isn’t taking any swings that big, but by focusing on the character Arj, an everyman in the gig economy that you may look right past in a big city like Los Angeles where the film takes place, they are clearly taking a page out of the Master Of None playbook.
Good Fortune is also produced in partnership with Alan Yang, Ansari’s Master Of None collaborator, so this is all very fitting. That same episode even includes a brief reference to Keanu Reeves, accidentally foreshadowing the fact that Reeves stars in Good Fortune as the angel Gabriel. Ansari has been gushing about working with the John Wick star, who managed to injure himself on set despite avoiding just that through five films in the action franchise.
Are you intrigued? Good! Because you can see Good Fortune in theaters on October 17 as a part of 2025’s movie release schedule. As for Master Of None, you can still catch it on Netflix.
