Alan Yang talks about you
What it means to write one of most successful TV show? Alan Yang tells it to I think You’re Interesting
If you, like me, love Master of None, you should love Alan Yang too. Even if he doesn’t appear in any episode, he’s the co-author along with Aziz Anzari (who performs as the main character Dev) and here he talks about how they developed the plot for the second season, right after the huge success of the first one. It shouldn’t have been easy to write the follow of such a huge blockbuster and that’s why they decided to go on a different path. In the first season they found a winning formula and they could have repeated it with slight variations, but they chose to build a different show which is still based on Anzari/Dev’s life but also on some different storylines, sometimes even “off topics”, like the 6th episode “New York, I love you” which tells stories of new yorkers and where Aziz almost never appears.
I love to be told how a creative process develops and here there’s plenty of hints and curious stuff. I’m not talking about things like “Wake up at 6 am and take a cold shower” (lucky us) but more about the very foundation of any creative process: observe reality and people, especially when you write stories about those people, like new yorkers. I do agree with Alan when he says that typing the story is actually the easiest part and that the office is the less creative space ever. He got inspirations only when he’s hanging around, at the grocery store or on the street. That’s where things start to go into the right place, like when he’s eating at the restaurant, a place that he considers very inspiring and loves so much (he loves food a lot, of course).
Very funny man, always smiling and happy but at the same time passionate and very clever in all he says.
