If anything, Master of None’s Season 2, which debuts Friday, doubles down on this ethos of curiosity and reveals it to be the show’s greatest strength. TV is filled with episodes dedicated to supporting characters (The Ringer’s Alison Herman calls these “Deep-Benchers”). But with Master of None, such episodes aren’t one-offs; they’re regular extensions of the show’s apparently broader mission of elevating different viewpoints, usually those of people on the margins of society (senior citizens, immigrants, women). It’s no coincidence that the most memorable and powerful episodes of the new season are the ones that, deliberately, have little to do with the joys and troubles of its star.

Which isn’t to say Dev doesn’t matter; most of the show is still about him. In both seasons, he’s sometimes the entry point into these other stories, like when he’s asking a friend about coming out to her family, or talking to his girlfriend’s grandmother about the loneliness of aging. This tactic—making Dev an audience proxy, or using his ignorance about a subject to model his eventual enlightenment—could come off as moralistic. Some episodes could easily be renamed by attaching “Dev Learns a Lesson About …” to the title, but more often than not, the approach felt fairly organic in Season 1.

Which brings us to Season 2, where Master of None has gotten ambitious on several fronts. It’s more cinematic, an overused term that’s accurate in this case, given how heavily influenced it was by the Italian films Ansari and Yang devoured between seasons. The show is as funny and as well-written as ever, and has deepened its commitment to understanding how love and intimacy work in a hyperconnected age. The weakest part of the season, unfortunately, is perhaps its main arc: a confusing relationship between Dev and a woman he meets in Italy.

Meanwhile, the season’s two best episodes—“New York, I Love You” and “Thanksgiving”—aren’t about Dev at all. In the former, he and his friends appear for less than a minute; in the latter, Ansari shines as a supporting character. “New York, I Love You” tells three loosely linked stories about three different people living in the city: a doorman, a young deaf woman, and an immigrant cab driver. “Thanksgiving” is a coming-of-age tale spanning 22 years that follows Dev’s childhood friend Denise (a terrific Lena Waithe) and her road to coming out as gay to her family. Both installments are beautifully shot and deeply humane. And both focus on characters of color whose stories rarely appear in TV or film, in part because of their ability, socioeconomic status, or sexual orientation.

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“New York, I Love You” starts out with Dev and his friends Arnold (Eric Wareheim) and Denise talking about seeing a new Nicolas Cage movie. Without warning, the camera wanders away from them on the street and begins following a luxury-apartment doorman named Eddie (Frank Harts) as he listens to a older white resident complain about not being able to call Native Americans “Indians” anymore. It’s a thrilling moment as you realize Master of None is going a Slacker-esque route: Just when you think you know who the show wants you to care about, the camera yanks you away and introduces you to another, equally engrossing life.