Aziz Ansari is currently working with executive producer Mike Schur on an untitled comedy series for Netflix, and he recently revealed some details about the show in an interview with Deadline. Here’s a particularly interesting part from the interview where Ansari reveals more about the show’s tone, and that he cast his real-life dad to play his dad:
I think, tonally, what we’re going for is more like 1970s comedies that are kind of grounded, really funny, but talk about real things—The Heartbreak Kid, the Elaine May version, and Tootsie, Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hal Ashby stuff like Shampoo. Even in the way we’re shooting it we’re trying to have a different tone than most of the single-camera comedies—it’s not like Parks, documentary style—but we’re trying to make it a little more naturalistic in feel. But the way we wrote it is, we started writing like a group, like an ensemble, and then we were like, “You know what? It’s hard.†On Parks there were so many characters. So for this we were like, “Let’s focus on my guy, and we’ll bring in all the people as we need them.†There’s kind of a repertory group of people that come in and out, but it’s not like an ensemble show. Now it’s just me and Noel [Wells]—who plays my love interest—for a whole episode. Or there’s an episode about my parents and it’s a lot of me and my dad. And my real dad plays my dad. (Laughs.) He’s really good… That’s the thing about this show—it’s deeply personal. I treated it like the way I would treat stand-up. Like, what are things that I really want to talk about and figure out? And me and Alan Yang, the person who’s showrunning with me and created it with me, we really wanted to make it something personal and not just something that was just funny but really said stuff that was interesting and explored ideas that we were passionate about.
Read the rest over at Deadline.