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This ain't no sitcom. This is indescribable. But let's try.

Master of None (now streaming on Netflix) is a vehicle for Aziz Ansari, famous for his minor but standout role on Parks and Recreation, his stand-up specials and, recently, his strange book Modern Romance: An Investigation. Ansari's comedy is anchored in an odd kind of dorky, obnoxious adorableness. He's very smart, but tends to play up his immaturity.

This series is a coming-of-age epic about Dev (Ansari), a 30-year-old first-generation American who is superficial and knows it. In fact, he wants out of that superficiality, but finds it's a long and winding road. Along that road, he deals with women, multiculturalism and friendship. The show – written by Ansari and Alan Yang – is often emphatically satiric and at times hilarious and at other points subtly poignant.

Some critics have put it in the context of current cable comedy such as Portlandia, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie, but it's different from all of those. It's Seinfeld-ian more than anything else.

Set very deftly in the New York of 2015, but not some glam Manhattan of shopping and nightclubs, it has the pace and feel of a J.D. Salinger story. Although no one talks about it outright, Master of None is about escaping phoniness.

Mostly, of course, it's about Dev trying to find work and meet women, but from the start it's clear this isn't really about singles hooking up. It's about recognizing the quality of the woman who will help to make Dev whole, mature and happy.

The first episode, which doesn't truly deliver the full texture of the series, is breezy but pointed. Dev and his friends are adults in a toy store, literally and metaphorically. Dev is a kid who connects with the small children of his married friends because, really, he's at the same emotional level. The thing is, Dev knows it.

There are terrific bits of absurd humour throughout the series. There's an early and glorious bit wherein a married woman says she has had a baby and named it Lucien. "That's my lizard's name! What small world," Arnold (Eric Wareheim), one of Dev's buddies, says. There is also a wonderfully staged scene in which Dev has to audition for a disaster movie, by Skype, while sitting in a coffee shop. And a hilarious episode that is, in part, built around people watching Sherlock on PBS and ruminating about Benedict Cumberbatch.

The second episode is a work of genius. It's a loopy but vital comic take on Dev and Brian (Kelvin Yu) trying to figure out how to be nice to their immigrant parents. They are, at first, typically rude to the people who moved to the United States and struggled to give their kids a better life. Dev's Indian parents are played by Ansari's own parents, both non-actors, which lends piquancy to it. When Dad asks Dev for help with his iPad, Dev reacts impatiently with, "I'm not your personal computer guy!" and announces he has an appointment to see a movie. Brian treats his Taiwanese parents much the same.

We see goofy but plaintive flashbacks of the lives those parents led in order to give these boy-men a very middle-class life. And yet there is no hugging, lesson-learned message. It's about the reality of young people being selfish and their parents putting up with it.

A later episode has Claire Danes, of all people, as a married food critic who decides she wants to have an affair with Dev. He's horrified but tempted, and then there's the food critic's husband, played by Noah Emmerich from The Americans, who is an awful man. It's a pleasure to see Danes, away from Homeland, going broad with the humour and slyly mocking the Carrie Mathison character for which she is famous.

Meanwhile, throughout, there's a budding romance. When we first meet Dev he's in bed with Rachel (Noel Wells), and then she disappears. But every now and then, Dev meets her again. What's interesting is that Rachel isn't a babe Dev lusts after – this is where the series leaves Seinfeld behind – but a funny, warm, independent woman who, very slowly, becomes the woman Dev depends on for fun, warmth and honesty. It's an exquisitely teased-out romance.

In its freshness, Master of None illuminates how awful conventional network comedy has become. If you want easily grasped, one-note characters, they're not on this Netflix series. If you want the traditional set-up and punchline comedy, it's not here, either. Instead, there's a thrilling originality at work – a humanity, a humour that, for all its emphasis on thirtysomething singles, feels formidably grown up and wise.

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