in

‘Ramy’ and ‘Mo’: How to Be Young, Reckless and Muslim in America

ramy air 305 prod 304 jp 00356rt

Today, Hulu debuted the third season of Ramy, the wonderful dramedy co-created by and starring comedian Ramy Youssef as a Muslim-American man struggling to reconcile his faith with his fondness for forbidden activities like sex, porn, and drugs. It’s been two and a half years since we last saw Ramy, but Youssef was not exactly idle during the long pandemic hiatus. In addition to writing or co-writing all 10 episodes of the new season and directing most of them, he co-created a whole other series about being young, reckless, and Muslim in America: Netflix’s Mo, starring and co-created by Ramy actor Mohammed Amer. (It debuted in late August.) 

So here are two shows premiering a month apart on two different streaming services. They share a co-creator, and several notable figures in front of and behind the camera. They touch on many of the same themes and occupy a similar middle ground between farce and tragedy. Yet Mo is not a spinoff, nor some kind of new franchise entry in the Ramy Expanded Cinematic Universe. Fans of one series will almost certainly like the other, but they also make a fascinating test case for how so much common DNA can turn out two very different products, like siblings who look vaguely similar but have many different interests from each other. 

Amer plays guys named Mo in both series, but they are not the same character. The Mo of Ramy still lives in New Jersey in Season Three, and still gets into embarrassing situations there, like a new episode where he tries to convince doctor pal Ahmed (Dave Merheje) to give him “a poop transplant” to solve his intestinal distress. (Ahmed correctly intuits that Mo got the idea from listening to Joe Rogan.) The Mo of Mo lives in Houston, with his mother Yusra (Fara Bsieso) and his brother Sameer (Omar Elba), and is dating Maria (Teresa Ruiz). While he also gets into trouble early and often, it is primarily a result of the desperation of being an undocumented immigrant, still waiting for the American courts to grant his family’s asylum petition decades after they arrived from the Middle East.

Mo’s precarious legal status is palpable in most scenes, and is by far the clearest delineation point between the shows. Mo makes impulsive mistakes of his own, but they tend to be more from external forces (like his difficulty finding and keeping a legitimate job), where Ramy often has no one to blame but himself for the mess he makes of his life and those of the people he cares about(*).

(*) This also means that Moconcerns itself more with practical matters than the spiritual ones that are so key to Ramy. Mo is a practicing Muslim, and his relationship with a Catholic woman causes tension with his mother, but he’s much less focused on his relationship with Allah than Ramy is.

There are other contrasts, like geography. The wide-open and sunny spaces of Texas offer an entirely different look from the urban and suburban northeast territory Ramy occupies. Beyond that, while Houston is not lacking in a Muslim community, Mo still feels more like a fish out of water than Ramy does, and the show frequently puts Amer in scenes where good ol’ boys are surprised by how charming they find this large, brown stranger. Ramy still has moments where he is made to feel like an outsider — in the season premiere, he’s agitated when a white woman attempts to equate being discriminated against for her belief in witchcraft with being Muslim — but it’s relatively far down the list of problems he faces.

lazyload fallback
Mo Amer, left, in the Netflix series ‘Mo.’ REBECCA BRENNEMAN/NETFLIX

And some of the difference is simply a case of Ramy having been around long enough to build out its supporting characters into people who can carry the story without the leading man around. There’s a stretch in the middle of this season where Ramy doesn’t appear at all, and instead the focus shifts to his hilariously judgmental, chain-smoking mother Maysa (Hiam Abbass); his self-aggrandizing father Farouk (Amr Waked); and his law student sister Dena (May Calamawy), who tries therapy and is told by her psychologist that her family has been emotionally abusive to her. (“I thought… we were just Arab,” Dena replies, her world turning upside down.) These Ramy-light episodes often showcase the series at its best, particularly in the ways it can be simultaneously sad and ridiculous, like Farouk’s clumsy attempt to talk a friend’s daughter into staying the course her unplanned pregnancy. (When he sees her smoking, he tries to stall her decision by asking, “Isn’t it better to abort a healthy baby?”) Mo begins to build that kind of foundation across its slightly shorter season, as we see Maria struggle with class issues and Sameer exhibit behavior suggesting he’s somewhere on the autism spectrum(*). But it’s early stages for that, so more of the dramatic burdens fall on Amer than Youssef has to shoulder over on Ramy.

(*) Even this offers some Ramy parallels, amusingly enough. In the new season, Ramy’s disabled friend Steve (Steve Way) begins dating Lena, a beautiful woman (played by supermodel Bella Hadid) who seems incapable of conversing on any subject without steering it back to her love of The Office.   

Assuming Netflix orders more seasons of this excellent new show, it’s not hard to imagine Mo experimenting more with spotlight episodes down the road. But would Mo be as willing to play around with its tone as Ramy so freely does? As it did in the first two seasons, Ramy likes to dance along the border between kitchen-sink realism and complete surreality. In one episode, Ramy sells a diamond to an elf-eared body modifier who wants to implant the jewel in his forehead; in another, a hook-up with a Palestinian woman during a business trip to Israel sets off a cascade of events that results in Ramy briefly teaming up with the Israeli military. (It’s at once horrifying and incredibly funny.) It takes incredible confidence to go to the kinds of tricky emotional places that Ramy likes to live in. And if the show can at times feel deeply uncomfortable (especially whenever Ramy, Maysa, and/or Farouk is screwing up), the payoffs are inevitably worth it.

The great thing about expanding representation in pop culture is that no one show or character has to embody the entire experience of a particular group. Ramy and Mo are no more meant to be the definitive statement on the Muslim-American experience than Ms. Marvel is. Ramy and Mo have much more creative overlap than, say, Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds do despite employing many of the same indigenous cast and crew members. But it’s as much fun to see all the ways these two are different than the ways they are the same.

All eight episodes of Mo Season One are available on Netflix, and all 10 episodes of Ramy Season Three are now streaming on Hulu.

Report

What do you think?

1.2k Points
Upvote Downvote

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *