By Christina Murphy – Columnist
New to Netflix this month is “Master of None,” a 10-episode series created by and starring Aziz Ansari. The self-reflective series gives the perspective of a man who cannot quite enter the adult world.

Ansari plays Dev, a 30-year-old actor entering a transitional phase in his life, whose most notable role to-date is a Go-Gurt commercial. One by one his friends are peeling away and settling into a world where a brownstone in Brooklyn, two kids and a Trinidadian nanny are signifiers of adulthood.

A mishap that starts with a broken condom and a frantic “can I get pregnant if…” Google search and ends with an Uber ride to pick up Plan B and faces him with the real possibility of parenthood.

He drops the unnamed girl off at her apartment to deal with removing his “little guys” from her system. This is the first of a handful of examples where a female character is used only to propel Dev’s narrative forward.

Aziz and his fellow single friend, Arnold, attend their friend’s baby’s first birthday party. Arnold is a chubby, bearded guy who appears to be way worse off than Dev, which tends to be his main point of support for matters like these. Eric Wareheim, who plays Arnold, is a foot taller than Ansari making it difficult to frame both characters in the same shot without one of them looking awkward and uncomfortable.

At the party, Dev sees his friend Amanda, who asks him to watch her two kids Grant and Lila. At this point in the episode, Dev has a positive outlook about the possibility of one day being a father.

We learn what he is thinking through cutaway scenes to his imagination. In the first cutaway, Dev is in black and white, dressed as James Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” coming home to two obedient children who rush over to jump into his arms for a hug.

Dev jumps at the chance to spend the day with Grant and Lila and takes them to the park and for frozen yogurt. He enjoys the fun aspects of taking care of children, but recoils once he actually has to assume responsibility for them – he does not want to have to go into the bathroom with Lila, who is too young to go by herself and gets angry when he has to buy an entire display of frozen waffles because Grant gets caught rubbing himself on them in a grocery store.

By the end of this experience, his outlook on fatherhood has changed and cuts away to a vision that closely resembles a nightmarish scene from “Requiem for a Dream.”

Dev is the stunted man-child for the modern age. The episode touches on points made by Ansari in his book, “Modern Romance” and his various stand-up sets about the intricacies of dating in a technologically reliant world with little-defined rules.

If you are familiar with Ansari’s work on “Parks and Recreation,” know that Dev is not Tom. Dev is far more humble and uncertain about himself, although he does have some Tom-like outbursts, such as him saying, “You gotta hit me with the deets of this candle,” while his friend confides in him about his divorce.

By the end of the first episode, Dev sets up the series to reject the “coming of middle-age” story the audience may have been expecting and rather suggests a story of someone avoiding adulthood all together.

Being an adult is about making sacrifices and letting go of things you once enjoyed, like eating a peanut butter, lettuce and ketchup sandwich made by a child, when delicious parm sandwiches are sitting on the table in front of you – a sacrifice Dev is clearly not willing to make just yet.