At the end of the Thanksgiving episode, Dev and Denise and her girlfriend, Michelle, and Denise’s family sit around the dining table, laughing and joking, their voices drowned out by a song that could be (and maybe, in fact, is) ’90s prime time television theme music. There’s a sunny, cozy simplicity to that moment that belies the complexity of the episode that precedes it, which takes a clear-eyed look at homophobia in the black community, through Denise’s experience of coming out to the three single straight women who raised her. This is no sitcom, the show seems to be saying, and yet it kind of is—a free-range version, liberated from the claustrophobic snow globe insularity of the genre, the oppressive laugh track cheeriness. These characters are always themselves—so much so that they’re practically caricatures—but they’re free to roam in time and space.

There are plot developments, but Ansari and Yang don’t seem overly preoccupied with advancing them. Dev gets a gig hosting an awful reality TV show and finds a mentor who might help him leverage that opportunity into a not-so-terrible reality show. He grapples with his singleness, falls in love, and learns the hard way—for the second time—that infatuation is sometimes not enough. There’s some character development, too, and what seems like a very conscious effort to delve into the experience of women. Season two Dev is slightly less cocky. He’s still calling out racism wherever he sees it, but he’s also butting up against the boundaries of his own woke-ness. In one episode, Dev sleeps with a woman he just met, who keeps her condoms in a black mammy cookie jar. Only after they finish does he tell her it offends him. “So you think I’m racist,” she points out indignantly, “but you still had sex with me?” In another, Dev fails to recognize his on-set makeup artist, a black man—an act of casual racially charged dismissal that he might excoriate someone else for doing (and made all the more complicated by the camaraderie Dev cultivated with the guy’s very pretty, biracial female predecessor). Later, we see evidence that Dev is less than attuned to blaring signs that a friend treats women in a sexually aggressive and bordering on predatory way. We also see Dev, in his own way, being more verbally aggressive than we’re used to, unintentionally making a woman uncomfortable with the weight of his expectations.

In the opening episode, Dev is having coffee in Modena with his friend Francesca (Alessandra Mastronardi), when he learns a new Italian word: “Allora,” which translates to “well,” as in the thing people say to fill the space while they come up with something to say that they think is actually meaningful. It’s those filler words, those “alloras,” that seem critical to the project of Master of None; it’s the things we blurt out—or act out—automatically, unthinkingly, out of force of habit, that most interest Ansari and Yang. Is Dev a little racist? Is he quietly sexist? Is he blind to his own blind spots? Absolutely. But so are we all.