Alan Yang

Phillip Y. Zhang
Creative New York
Published in
15 min readNov 15, 2016

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This week, we sat down with Alan Yang, executive producer and co-creator of the Netflix comedy series Master of None, to chat about growing up in California, how to make it as an Asian American in Hollywood, and why the Emmy Award-winning series “was always going to be a New York show.”

Alan Yang. Photograph by Sam Reiss. Courtesy the photographer

Thanks Alan for being here. We’ll try to keep it light and get some cool, random stories.

Great. I love stories. I got a lot of them.

Let’s start with the basics — can you tell me about where you’re from, what growing up was like?

I was born in San Bernardino, California, “the Inland Empire.” It’s a place that’s kind of interesting…blue collar and Republican, even though it’s in California. It’s pretty diverse. My high school in Riverside was probably 40 percent Latino and maybe 20 percent black, but only one percent Asian.

My parents had settled there. They’re both immigrants from Taiwan, and they moved to America. They moved to New York, and they lived in the Bronx and Buffalo. Then, they settled in this very weird place, where it’s kind of a desert also, and it’s where Vince Gilligan wanted to set Breaking Bad originally.

What were some of your hobbies growing up?

Man, I was kind of a stereotypical Asian kid in some ways, where I did everything. I learned a lot of instruments — piano, violin, saxophone. When I was about 14, because I thought those were nerdy instruments, I went and bought myself an electric guitar like a Mexican Stratocaster that I still have today. I taught myself to play guitar and bass.

I also liked playing sports a lot, which was in many ways a social life saver, because I was this tiny Asian kid who wore glasses and was good at school. People didn’t care that I was good at school or looked weird because I was fairly good at sports.

I also did all that nerdy stuff, I did Academic Decathlon and mock trial and literary magazine and all that stuff. Pack your schedule and do as much as possible, which is kind of the philosophy I adhere to today, too.

I had some good friends. I loved comedy growing up and that was always a big part of my life too.

Comedy was a big part of your life as a fan? Or did you practice?

As a fan. I didn’t practice because I didn’t know that this was a job in any way, shape, or form.

What I did do was, again, kind of an Asian thing, we weren’t encouraged to watch a ton of TV. It’s that typical thing of, as soon as you are allowed to watch you’re just going to go crazy.

It’s like withholding drugs from an addict. As soon as I was 12, 13, 14, when I started to be left home alone more or whatever, I was just watching way too much TV. All kinds of TV. Good stuff like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Mr. Show, SNL, you know, everything on Comedy Central, The Kids in the Hall.

I mean, bad stuff, too. I was just consuming television all the time. My mom would make fun of me and say, “Why are you watching three straight hours of Seinfeld and The Simpsons episodes you’ve definitely seen before?”

In retrospect, it’s like, “Dude, mom, that stuff is way more valuable than any of the biology shit I learned.” [laughs] It’s so crazy. It really was a weird sort of learning by osmosis, you learn what you like and what you don’t like.

In retrospect, you realize that stuff you really loved when you were 15, 16…they never really went away. They kind of shape who you are later on.

Alan Yang. Photograph by Sam Reiss. Courtesy the photographer

How did you end up getting into the industry yourself?

I wrote for a comedy magazine in college and that really changed a lot of things for me. It really changed everything, because you meet really funny, smart people. Still some of my best friends to this day.

To me, I don’t know that there is any closer analogue to a writers’ room — to a real, professional television show’s writers’ room — than being on the staff of the [Harvard] Lampoon. It’s 10 to 15 people. You’re terrified when you get on staff, just like when you get on the staff of a show. You’re trying to make people laugh, trying to be funnier than they are. In the case of that magazine, the actual product isn’t as important as the time you spend hanging out there. You’re watching TV and you’re making jokes. You’re going to dinner with them and you’re making jokes. You’re just trying to be funny.

There’s tons of resentment in comedy about this sort of magazine, which I get because it sounds like a horrendous, elitist, disgusting old boy’s club

Anything with the word “Harvard” in it…

Absolutely. It sounds like all those things and I’m not disputing that. But to me, the contrast is the final clubs at Harvard which have come under fire recently. That, to me, is more of a clear-cut example of “It’s who you know.” If you went to a private high school you would have a much better chance of getting into a final club than if you came from some weird high school in Alaska. On the Lampoon, to me, it always felt like it wasn’t a final club. It was an island of misfit toys of people who were so nerdy that, even at Harvard, they didn’t fit in.

A lot of the people who graduated my year moved to LA or New York. Then what you get is a bunch of unemployed, broke friends to hang out with and it doesn’t feel so lonely. To all the people who didn’t have that safety net of people, I commend you and that’s amazing. To go out there and just be totally alone, and marooned, and writing scripts in your room, that’s a very difficult thing. I had the incredible good fortune to have some buddies out there with me.

I had a couple of fun brushes of almost getting a job. I got submitted to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I went in and met with his head writer, and Jay Leno came in at the end and he’s, “We’re just trying to add new blood. We’ve got an older writing staff right now. How old are you?” and I was, “I’m 20.” He’s, “I’m not going to hire a 20‑year‑old. My youngest writer is 52,” or whatever it was. “Go write for another show and come back in five years and then I’ll hire you.”

It was my first meeting and it was pretty crazy. I was really excited because I said, “Look, I’ve been here for a couple of months and I got a meeting on the Tonight Show. It was incredible. I’m going to be fine.” Then nothing. That’s how it is. It’s feast or famine. I didn’t even get meetings. It was just months and months and months.

So, what was your first job?

Ultimately, I was lucky enough to get my first job on this show called Last Call with Carson Daly, which was a 1:30 a.m. talk show on NBC. I moved to New York. That show’s shot at Rockefeller Center on the stage that Saturday Night Live uses. It wasn’t ultimately what I wanted to be doing comedically, but what a great, fortunate opportunity to get to do that at 22 as my first job. It was really fun and I got to live in the East Village and live in New York, which is the best city in the world.

After that, I was lucky enough to start working on South Park. I was there for a season and I got to watch Trey Parker and Matt Stone work. Those guys are geniuses. Unbelievable what they do.

Then I got a job at Parks and Recreation, which at the time was known as the untitled Office spin‑off because it was potentially going to be a spin‑off of The Office. I started on that show as a baby writer, as a staff writer. I learned so much from Mike Schur, Greg Daniels, Dan Goor, Norm Hiscock, all the writers on that show, Harris Wittels.

I spent six years on that show with an incredible group of people. The cast: Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Scott, Rob Lowe, and Aziz, obviously. It was lightning in a bottle where very, very talented, funny people were also very, very fun to hang around with. We did seven seasons and during the seventh season, Aziz and I started working on Master of None.

How did you and Aziz get to know each other and start working together?

Basically, we became friends on that show. He wasn’t a writer, he was just an actor, so when you’re coworkers in that context, you don’t necessarily see each other that much at work, but when we started working on that show we were in our mid‑20s and we just had a lot in common. We were both single dudes bumming around in LA. We liked to eat a lot. We liked to travel, so we started hanging out, and going to parties, and doing dumb stuff together. As that friendship kept growing, I feel like I became someone he could trust and vice versa.

As the show started nearing the end, we wanted to work together on something. We had a few ideas, one of which was, “Let’s not do 22 or 30 episodes. Let’s do 10 a season and let’s shoot in New York, so that we can live in New York and make the most out of our dying single years.”

[laughter]

Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang. Photo by Marion Curtis. Courtesy Netflix

Why did you and Aziz choose to set Master of None in New York? How do you guys treat New York versus the all the other shows that have been set in New York?

The show works best in New York because it’s about the feeling of being around 30 and not totally knowing where you’re going in life, but having a lot of options. That was the theme of season one and New York has more options than any other place that humans have ever built. It’s teeming with opportunities around every corner. The number of bars and restaurants on any street is staggering. That’s kind of a metaphor for what it can feel like to live here, and how overwhelming and stressful that can be.

It was always going to be a New York show. It’s reflected in the production design. It’s reflected in the costumes. It’s reflected in all of that. I can’t tell you how many times — and this has been really gratifying for me — where people say they watch the show like, “Those are the places we go.” It’s like, “We’re going to the Smile, we’re going to the Commodore, we’re going to Dirty French.”

Do you have a favorite neighborhood? You said you lived in the East Village for a while?

Yeah, I love the East Village, man. I love the Lower East Side. I’m living in Soho right now, which has been great. I’ve only been there a couple months but it’s wonderful. We work out of an apartment in Soho, too. That’s been really great.

I feel like, when I live in New York, I want to live in Manhattan because I want to be in the middle of the most densely populated place in the world. Like, there’s where I want to be. I want the extremes.

I like walking. I like walking a lot. I would take these long walks, and I would walk on the weekends and just sort of think about writing the next thing. I literally would walk from my place in East Village to the Met, and to MoMA. You get to go to these amazing museums and it was beautiful out. You go through Central Park or you walk along the Hudson and it just makes your heart swell. It makes you feel connected to other people just to see so many human faces around, and to talk to people along the way.

My friends and I are really into food and wine. That’s another one of my favorite things about New York. You can walk from Marlow and Sons and you can go to Four Horsemen, you can go to Contra and Wildair, you can go to Santina and Carbone, you can go to Lupa, you can go to Momofuku Nishi and Momofuku. These are all my buddies’ places and they’re all amazing. They’re all in one city, often times, blocks from each other.

Practically next door to each other.

Exactly. How amazing is that, man? How amazing is that?

And we know this is a very specific, privileged way of living in New York. We’re aware that the characters on Master of None are better off financially than the vast majority of people, but that was very honest and very specific to our lives. There are shows, for instance Broad City and Girls, that are about people in their early 20s or mid‑20s who are struggling to make ends meet. Those shows do a great job of showing that. To us, the more honest expression of our experiences is, “It’s a guy who’s 30.” Dev has been lucky, like incredibly lucky, and made some money on a dumb Go-Gurt commercial, so he lives a different life than Hannah Horvath, right? It was very purposeful, “This is our experience and we’re just going to show the places we go to.”

One of the other aspects of the show that makes it unique, which has been commented on a lot, is that it’s different for the main characters of the show to be an Indian guy, an Asian guy, and a black woman. What was cool about that to us was, that was not in any way forced on us. That’s just what it looks like when we hang out with our friends. It was just, “That’s what it is, let’s just show it.” I think that’s different from a lot of older shows that you’ve seen in New York. The shows that I grew up watching, Seinfeld and Friends, I just never saw people like that on TV. I’m happy that our show is representative of what we look like.

Alan Yang. Photograph by Sam Reiss. Courtesy the photographer

That’s interesting. Do you believe that minority characters or stories about minorities have to be written by minorities?

I would never prohibit someone from writing about someone who doesn’t look like them, because that’s absurd. Some of the best stories ever written have been written by someone who doesn’t necessarily look like the protagonist.

I will say that I’m glad that there are starting to be shows where the creators look like the people on screen, or the creators just look different from the people who have got the opportunity to create these shows. I think there has been such an asymmetry in the proportion in people who have gotten to tell stories on television and in films in the past.

It’s refreshing to see people get the opportunity to tell their stories because for so long, their stories — if they had been told at all — a lot of times those stories have been told by white people, which is kind of insane. It’s cool that’s just starting to turn, because we have centuries of storytelling that’s from the other point of view. We got one Hamilton now. It has been decades and decades and decades of film and television where there has been almost no diversity at all, especially on camera but behind it as well. You just look at the number of female directors or gay directors, it’s staggering, and forget about Asian directors.

I read a piece that was about the history of hosts on Saturday Night Live. There’s been something like a thousand hosts, because there have been 40 seasons of that show. Out of those thousand hosts, two of them have been Asians. Two out of a thousand.

Who were they?

It was Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu. We have not had one in 15, 20 years, something like that.

The most stereotypical Asian guy ever.

Exactly, yes. By the way, only one of them has been Asian American. Jackie Chan is an Asian dude. He’s not Asian American, he’s from Asia. He doesn’t live in America. There hasn’t been an Asian American man. There has been zero.

We got a ways to go. I know people get sick of it. They’re already sick of the diversity conversation. You’ve got to repeat it 100 times for people to hear it once sometimes. If you don’t make the noise, nothing is going to change. We can make a lot of noise, it is still going to take time. The fact that, maybe, if you scream enough, if you make yourself a nuisance enough, then when someone is doing the next Marvel movie or Star Wars or whatever…it might get into their ear a little bit.

By the way, it is happening. JJ Abrams is doing a great job. He put a lady and a black guy in Star Wars. We got a Mad Max whose star is a lady. We got a Rocky movie starring a black guy. That’s all great man.

But we have the opposite happening, too. We have whitewashing happening.

Oh, man. Do not get me started.

Let’s go there.

Yeah, here’s my thing. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Where they want to tell us, “We cannot put a non‑star in a movie. Everyone we put in our movie has to be a huge movie star.” I am like, really? Is that really the case?

I’m buddies with Chris Pratt. I’ve known him for years and years and years. He is an amazing actor. He’s incredibly charismatic. But he was not a movie star when they cast him in Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World. He was number seven on the call sheet of Parks and Rec. And he was killing it on Parks, but I guarantee you, the grosses of those movies do not reflect the ratings of Parks and Recreation. They made him a star because they put him in these massive movies, and he proved them right.

That’s why it’s frustrating that a movie like Ghost in the Shell, where the source material actually dictates that [the lead] be an Asian person, and there aren’t a lot of movies like that. It’s very, very discouraging when that one opportunity doesn’t happen. That’s one of the only ones. They’re not going to cast an Asian guy in Jurassic World. They’re just not.

That would break my brain where, man, you just don’t have those opportunities. Look, they cast Sam Worthington in Avatar and Terminator. Like, who is Sam Worthington? No one knew who he was. That’s the biggest movie of all time!

Seriously, who is that guy? I don’t know.

They didn’t cast a movie star in that! Where was the movie star doctrine then? It didn’t matter! And by the way, it’s the biggest movie of all time! There’s enough movies where, hey, for some reason if you’re like a dude from Australia, they can cast you, but if you’re an Asian woman, they’re not going to cast you as a lead. Why? Why is that?

Even as supporting characters, like in The Martian.

Oh! Yes! The Martian. I’ve talked to the producers of The Martian and they’re very bummed out about it. I think they actually had someone who was Indian and at the last second, he had to drop out or something. And by the way, it’s not the worst thing in the world to cast Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is an amazing actor.

But still, we talk about The Martian in Master of None. We talk about the Indian character in The Social Network. There’s one Indian guy in this movie, and instead everyone is white. It’s really, truly crazy.

Same thing happened, this is years ago, but there’s a movie called 21, which is based on a book called Bringing Down the House about a bunch of MIT students who go to Vegas and basically use math to take down the casinos and make millions of dollars. In reality, almost all of these kids were Asian. It was tons and tons of Asian MIT kids. I think if you watch the movie, maybe there’s one Asian guy? Maybe? I think it’s like seven white guys or something and a hot white lady.

Look, we can complain all we want. The fact is, as Asian people who work in entertainment, you just have to be better. You’ve got to write better, you’ve got to direct better, you’ve got to act better because you need the pool of people, man. We don’t want to just cast the same people over and over again that we’ve seen in other stuff. You come in…these white guys are killers, man, because they’ve been in UCB for 10 years. They’ve got their reps in, they’ve been on stage for 12 years, they’re doing shows every night. They’re really good. They’re really good and you’ve got to be better than those guys.

It’s hard because they’re great. I’m just saying, if you’re an Asian actor out there, or you’re an Asian actress, or an Asian writer, you’ve got to work hard and you’ve got to really, really practice because people are going to cast the best person and they’re not going to cast you just because you’re Asian.

You have to work hard. I’m imploring you to be good because I want to cast you, but I can’t unless you’re good.

It comes back to what we were saying with high school in California. Asian guy at a public school, just having to do everything to get into an Ivy League college.

Yeah. Work as hard on your acting as you did doing Academic Decathlon in high school because that’s the only way you’re going to get there. [laughs]

Alan Yang. Photo by Sam Reiss. Courtesy the photographer

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