Master Of None Season 3's Major Story Changes Explained By Aziz Ansari

If the first two seasons of "Master of None" were so critically acclaimed, why did the third season take such a sharp turn? The Netflix dramedy spent its initial two sets of episodes following Dev, played by co-creator Aziz Ansari, who struggles with his dating life and his career as an actor. Season 3 relegates Dev to a minor supporting character who only shows up in two episodes.

In his place, Season 3 upgrades Denise (Lena Waithe) from supporting character to the main star and she gets a storyline heavily inspired by Ingmar Bergman's experimental slow-burn 1973 miniseries "Scenes From a Marriage." Speaking to IndieWire about the changes, Ansari noted a trend for modern shows to be "fast" and "flashy," and said he wanted to make a season of television that was "so still and so quiet that it would make people lean in and pay attention."

The gap between seasons, the shortened episode count, and Ansari's drop in screentime all contributed to a perception that Season 3's changes were a response to the allegation of sexual misconduct against Ansari in 2018. According to a 2021 Hollywood Reporter article, Ansari said the COVID-19 pandemic forced the show to scrap Dev-centric episodes planned for Season 3, and pre-scandal interviews indicate he might've shaken up the series anyway: "I don't have anything else to say about being a young guy being single in New York eating food around town all the time," he told Vulture in 2017.

While viewers liked Lena Waithe's character in the first two seasons, and her Season 2 spotlight episode "Thanksgiving" was an Emmy-winning standout, that didn't necessarily mean fans were game to watch her replace Aziz Ansari as the full-time lead. Season 3 didn't just change the main character, but it also replaced the first two seasons' comedic tone with a more dramatic one, its urban setting with a rural upstate New York landscape, and its digital cameras with film.

For Ansari, the jarring nature of Season 3 was part of the appeal. As he explained in a 2025 interview, "I had this aggressive idea of like, 'Let's do the show again, but take away everything people like about it. Let's really challenge ourselves.'"

Ansari pointed to the change in leads and the slower pacing as two ideas that sounded "terrible" on paper: "Oh, I'm not going to be in the show anymore! We're going to hold on them doing laundry for three minutes!" he said. "It was a little bit scary because it's not what we had done before."