Even in an age of downer comedies, “Getting On” is a hard sell. It’s set in a failing extended-care ward, whose patients are elderly women. The caretakers do a saintly job, but their own lives are stunted: the doctors are solipsists, the nurses are martyrs, and every patient is going to die. Both aesthetically and in its style of humor, the show leans hard into ugliness, with shit jokes, dementia jokes, and enough aging-vagina jokes to make Charlie Sheen blush.
In other words, it’s a humiliation comedy, set in one of the more actively humiliating realms of life; a medical show with few of the healing truisms of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Call the Midwife”; and a female-ensemble show stripped of illusions of empowerment. Yet “Getting On,” which is based on the acclaimed British original, and which is now in its final season on HBO, lingers in my mind as much as, if not more than, almost any other dark comedy, even in this era of exceptionally good options. (“Review,” “Bojack Horseman,” “Girls,” “Veep,” “Louie,” “Doll & Em,” “You’re the Worst,” “Rick and Morty”—I could go on. Why do people even talk about the drama on cable when the comedy field is so much stronger?) “Getting On” ’s signature is a pungent blend of compassion and nihilism, a sensibility that may be recognizable to anyone who has floated in the miasmic half-life of a hospital—the definition of “You had to be there.” Its best jokes work as a magnifying lens for people the world usually prefers to keep invisible.
Only you know if this is your kind of thing. If it is, please go back and watch the excellent first two seasons, which, with only six episodes each, are easy to catch up on. Many of the show’s strongest bits are moments of slapstick that are hard to imagine on any other show; they mine the foulest aspects of aging and medical distress for “Jackass”-level hilarity. In one of the standout episodes in Season 2, Varla—a bigoted, manic old crone, played by the great June Squibb—is scheduled to check out of the ward, only to have the process degenerate into racial slurs and ball-grabbing. Eventually, Varla strips down and gets caught in an automatic door, her squat naked body squashed and flapping, while she howls as if she were Queen Lear. In the new season, an addled elderly woman gets stapled repeatedly in the head as part of a medical procedure, and smiles blankly as her family looks on in horror. The scene goes on for so long that it begins to feel like too long—and then it goes on for one beat more, rounding the corner from punishing to hilarious.
Laurie Metcalf plays the head doctor, Jenna James, a wannabe fecal-research luminary who helplessly patronizes her nurses, DiDi (Niecy Nash, the world’s most skillful underplayer) and the needy, bossy Dawn (Alex Borstein). None of them are happy, exactly, but Dawn is an indelible weirdo: with her lacquered black hair and her childlike pop-eyes, she’s a vortex for drama, so desperate to be loved that she’ll take vomit-soaked kisses from a dog just to feel intimacy. “I just feel so sorry for anyone who’s not married,” Dawn crows, bragging about her quickie marriage. But when she learns that she’s seriously ill the show captures the cosmic horror of what nurses know: that, to quote the songwriter Jason Isbell, no one dies with dignity. “Do you want us to turn you off now?” an E.M.T. asks, as Dawn stares through a long-distance telepresence robot at a patient they’ve lost. “No, I can do it from my end,” she replies. “I want to stay on a little while longer.” The shot lingers, capturing Dawn’s face filling the distant screen, as she gazes into the room of a dead woman.
The first four episodes of this season, though skillfully directed by Miguel Arteta, vary in effectiveness, but the third is pretty perfect, particularly Rhea Perlman’s performance as a double-amputee convict determined to escape from her hospital bed. “Getting On” provides an ideal stage for such cameos: last season featured brilliant performances from Betty Buckley, Jean Smart, and Carrie Preston. But a special prize should go to Birdy, played by the eighty-seven-year-old Ann Guilbert, whose TV roots go back to “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” where she played the nosy neighbor, Millie. Birdy’s been in the ward since the first episode, manhandled and soothed by the ensemble. In a scene that suggests the intent of the whole show, she simply looks up at DiDi and asks, “Do you think about me?” DiDi pauses and replies, quietly, “More than you can imagine.”
On a trip to Los Angeles a few years ago, I caught Aziz Ansari’s standup act at the club Largo. He was pretty funny, but there was a sardonic narrowness to his performance, which was devoted to single-guy dating issues—hookup etiquette, sexting, and so on. At the time, Ansari was best known for playing Tom Haverford, on “Parks and Recreation,” an extreme variation on that same hipster-bro persona: a wannabe mogul, drenched in his signature “cologne cloud,” who skirted active douchiness only because of a strain of enthusiastic innocence.
So I wasn’t prepared for how strong and wide-ranging and genuinely funny “Master of None,” Ansari’s new Netflix comedy, turned out to be. If “Getting On” is a downer comedy, “Master of None,” which Ansari created with Alan Yang, is a fizzy upper, puppyish yet stealthily confident in its comedic goals. Its main character is Dev—an Ansari-like actor, a young single guy in New York who watches Netflix, banters with his buddies, goes to clubs, auditions for TV shows, and hooks up. He lives life as a choose-your-own-adventure, continually worried about which page to turn to. “Part of me is, like, Yeah, it could be an amazing human experience,” Dev muses in the pilot, about having kids. “But then part of me is, like, All right, later tonight, I want to get some pasta. . . . What if I don’t find a sitter, huh? Then what? What, I’m not eating the pasta? That sounds horrible.”
That opening installment has shaggy charm, but it suggests a more familiar show: an urbane indie-film spin on “Friends” or “New Girl,” all sexual mishaps and marrieds versus singles. Then the series cracks open, starting with the second episode, an instant classic about second-generation immigrants and their parents (Ansari’s mother and father play Dev’s parents), a plot so affecting that it likely caused a wave of phone calls to elderly relatives. “What an insane journey!” Dev’s Taiwanese-American friend marvels. “My dad used to bathe in a river. And now he has a car that talks to him.”
An equally strong episode, “Indians on TV,” is a cunningly plotted screwball meditation on ethnic-casting politics, with a running joke about Indian actors having their hearts broken by the revelation that the eighties movie “Short Circuit 2” starred Fisher Stevens in brownface. When Dev considers exposing a racist remark by a TV executive, he gets strategic advice from Busta Rhymes: “I don’t think you should play the race card. Charge it to the race card—feel me?” These scenes add up to a satisfying meta-statement: letting four varied Indian actors debate their own representation opens fresh comic areas, but it also lets us know who is in charge.
The show continues to deepen, building on themes about empathy and risk. Dev falls for a P.R. rep named Rachel. He is cast as a scientist in a “black virus movie” called “The Sickening.” In certain ways, Dev is a callow guy, but he’s also helplessly insatiably curious, an identity-politics empath. When female friends tell him stories about stalkers, he becomes a mouthy insta-feminist. Even a public masturbator brings out his tendency to overidentify: “All right, stop making me weirdly kind of sympathize with you,” Dev complains. Once in a while—as in an episode about listening to old people—this approach verges on corny. Not every joke lands. But it doesn’t matter. The show, with its funky score, “Louie”-ish look, and game ensemble, has an infectious air of optimism, a romantic streak much like that of “Parks and Recreation,” from which “Master of None” got several of its writers. Ansari’s breakthrough looks like another small cable comedy, but it feels like the future. ♦
