Master of the Coming Out Story: Thanksgiving with the Watkins Family on Netflix’s Master of None
All across America, Thanksgiving is rich with tradition. We eat the same foods year after year, gather the same extended family members around the same table, and for many engage in those awkward conversations about difficult topics — from religion to partisan politics. But for some, Thanksgiving is also about change, trying new things, and new faces around the table. We’ve finally let go of that green bean casserole recipe in our house (you know the one with the mushroom soup and fried onion strings), we had some new faces around the table this year, and we managed to make it through both dinner and dessert without too many awkward conversations about taboo topics.
Master of None’s Thanksgiving episode (Season 2, Episode 8, released May 12, 2017) offers a humorous yet in many ways both classic and groundbreaking take on the American family Thanksgiving. In the Emmy-award winning episode, we witness the evolution of the Watkins family Thanksgiving, from the 1990’s to present day. Throughout the 34 minute episode, we watch as Dev Shah (Aziz Ansari) repeatedly sits down with the Watkins family–friend Denise (Lena Waithe), mom Catherine (Angela Bassett), aunt Joyce (Kym Whitley), and grandma Ernestine (Venida Evans) — after first fulfilling his duties as the macaroni and cheese tester. In truth, Ansari’s character blends into the background in this episode — apart from a hilarious back and forth with a Thanksgiving 2016 visitor, Nikki — — a girlfriend of Denise’s who is obsessed with her Instagram account — — NipplesandToes23. Yes, that is correct, NipplesandToes23. NipplesAANNNNDDDToes23.
It almost goes without saying that the real stars of this episode are Lena Waithe and Angela Bassett as we watch them both come to terms with Denise’s awareness of her sexual orientation and as a result, redefine yet continue to maintain the terms of their mother-daughter relationship.
As others have written, the Thanksgiving episode of Master of None is a truly trailblazing, heartwarming, and representationally important coming out story at its core. Notably, the story of Denise’s awareness of her sexual orientation is told over time, as we see her evolve from a little girl in a frilly flowered dress who thinks her Indian friend Dev is also black, to a “Lebanese” teenager (she’s not yet comfortable with the word lesbian) with a crush on “mixed Erica,” to a woke young college student telling her mom she’s gay in a Queens diner back in 2006.
As Denise grows, we also see how the world around her changes — from the days of watching Fresh Prince with Dev on television to discussions about O.J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Bland at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Denise and her entire family are indeed influenced by what developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner termed the macrosystem (the larger institutional structures of our world) and the chronosystem (the evolution of human and historical time). As my own research has shown in an exploration of the hit Amazon Studios show, Transparent, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory offers a useful framework through which to view coming out stories and narratives exploring gender identity, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. Much like Maura Pfefferman on Transparent, Denise Watkins’ declaration of her sexual orientation does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, it happens over time (in this case from the 1990’s through the present day) and in relation to other institutional structures, values, and family norms.
As Denise tells Dev back in 1999, for members of the black community, being gay is often seen as a choice. In her own African-American family (and presumably in Dev’s Indian-American immigrant family), children are seen as “trophies.” Being gay “tarnishes the trophy.” Early on, we see Catherine (Denise’s mother; Angela Bassett) explain how hard it is for minorities in America (she tells a young Dev and Denise that a minority is “a group of people who have to work twice as hard in life to get half as far,”) and how much harder the struggle is for black women in America (“it’s three times as hard”). Taking the unique dynamics of race and gender into account is what helps to make this particular coming out story so real and relevant. Because there are so few stories of black women coming out on television, it’s also what makes Master of None important as a tool for engagement, activism, and awareness. Don’t take it from me when Lena Waithe’s Emmy acceptance speech says all this and more:
“I love you all and last but certainly not least my LGBTQIA family,” she went on. “I see each and every one of you. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers — every day when you walk out the door and put on your imaginary cape and go out there and conquer the world because the world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren’t in it.
“And for everybody out there that showed so much love for this episode, thank you for embracing a little Indian boy from South Carolina and a little queer black girl from the South Side of Chicago,” she said. “We appreciate it more than you could ever know.”
Master of None presents us with a Thanksgiving dinner that in many ways mirrors our own. There is the same food, the same aging relatives and the occasional new face, the same often uncomfortable discussion about race, politics, and the news of the day around the dinner table. But there is also a diverse coming out story that is still too infrequently seen on television. For that reason alone, I’m thankful for Master of None. And of course don’t forget that delicious looking macaroni and cheese.
Amy Bree Becker, Ph.D. is an associate professor of communication at Loyola University Maryland. She is a lover of television and researches the effects of entertainment television and political comedy on attitudes, behavior, and engagement.
