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The first episode of Netflix’s larkish dramedy “Mo” reveals exactly what its title character, Mohammed Najjar, is capable of. He’s camped out in a parking lot, peddling “authentic bootlegs”—faux designer sunglasses, Rolex watches, Gucci belts—from the trunk of his 1970 Ford Torino when an older white man with a cowboy hat and a pained gait passes by. Despite their outward differences, he’s an easy mark for Mo, a heavyset Palestinian dude who can commiserate about back pain in a Texas twang that wasn’t there a few seconds ago. At first, the older man dismisses the Yeezy foam slides Mo has in mind for him as “alien shoes”—and yet, moments later, he walks away a happy customer, having purchased not just the Yeezys but also a fake Chanel purse for his wife.
Mo knows he can cajole, disarm, persuade. His quick thinking has been an asset to his family since his childhood: one memorable flashback to their escape from Kuwait during the Gulf War shows the young Mo distracting the guards at a border crossing with crocodile tears and a Ninja Turtle figurine. The Najjars eventually settled in Houston, where Mo has assimilated in his own way. He speaks three languages—English, Arabic, and Spanish—and, in the first season, he has a Mexican American girlfriend, Maria (Teresa Ruiz), whom he teaches rude words in his native tongue. But the greatest encumbrance in his life—his asylum case, which has been pending for more than two decades, preventing him from finding legal work and from visiting loved ones abroad—can’t be resolved through a conversation or a display of humanity. Not even Mo can charm a wall.
Season 1 of “Mo” débuted in the summer of 2022, borrowing freely from the biography and family history of its co-creator and star, the comic Mohammed Amer. (Like the Najjars, the Amers were repeatedly displaced, moving from Palestine to Kuwait, then from Kuwait to the U.S.; like the fictional Mo, Amer used to sell knockoffs.) Three years later, as the show’s second and final season drops, the series feels even timelier. Season 2 begins in 2022 and concludes just before October 7th and the subsequent devastation of Gaza—perhaps too heavy a topic for this show to take on directly. But the eight new episodes, which were written in 2023 and filmed in 2024, implicitly address the helplessness and the heartbreak experienced by the Palestinian diaspora watching tragedy unfold on the other side of the world.
The Peabody Award-winning “Mo” has much in common with other recent comedies about immigrant families, such as the rebooted “One Day at a Time” and “Ramy,” the brainchild of “Mo” ’s co-creator, Ramy Youssef. But the unifying theme of this series is statelessness. The masterstroke of the first season was to map such an unusual political condition onto the familiar sitcom trope of a thirtysomething afflicted by arrested development. Because Mo himself has been put on hold, he’s put everything else on hold. He won’t marry Maria after years of dating—ostensibly holding out until she gives up her own faith to convert to Islam, which he knows she won’t do. And he’s loath to upset his widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), with whom he still lives, hiding from her not just his haram tattoo but also the wound from a stray bullet that grazed him during a grocery run gone awry. (She eventually discovers both—and, naturally, is more upset about the tattoo.) Maybe Mo clings to his heritage and to the idea of a lost homeland so tightly in part because he’s been denied citizenship and belonging in the country where he’s spent most of his life. Whatever the case, he can be a real jerk to people he believes to be cultural sellouts, including his sister, Nadia (Cherien Dabis), who married a white man—even if both Nadia and her young son, Osama, are better versed in the Arabic language and in Islamic history than Mo is.
The result is funny, kinetic, and unpredictable; it’s also a deft character study that reveals how the creaky bureaucracy of the asylum system can warp even good-natured men by deferring their hopes and shrinking their possibilities. But Mo is a slippery-enough rascal that he can, and does, occasionally deflect some of his own flaws onto his situation. Part of the show’s greatness is that you can’t tell where the personal stops and the political begins.
Season 1 was cohesive in its vision of Mo’s life and of the way it fell apart—culminating, after a series of missteps, in a nightmare scenario that leaves him stranded on the wrong side of the Mexican border, unable to return to the U.S. Season 2, directed in part by Amer himself, is a sillier, sadder, and shaggier follow-up. Mo finds his way home, at a cost. With little to lose, he lets his mask of affability slip more easily, and his outbursts make his life even more difficult. He takes it hard that Maria has moved on—at his urging—with an Israeli chef (Simon Rex) whom he suspects of culinary appropriation, a charge the show itself can’t quite decide how seriously to take. And, even after Mo receives a work permit through a Kafkaesque administrative saga, he becomes the biggest obstacle to the family business that arises from the opportunity. Stasis, it seems, is still where he’s most comfortable.
The new season finds Mo striving toward growth: moving out of his mom’s house, learning to work alongside his mildly autistic brother, Sameer (Omar Elba). It’s pulled in less compelling directions by the broad caricatures who now populate the edges of the story, including a marriage-crazed blonde hottie Mo humors until he can’t, and a recently green-card-approved friend whose gun collection seems considerably more expansive than his English-language vocabulary. But if the humor doesn’t land as solidly as before, the more serious subplots, centered on Mo’s feelings of disconnection from his roots and Yusra’s compulsive doomscrolling about violence in her native Palestine, carry the show. These arcs converge, to moving effect, in the series finale, when the Najjars finally get to visit the West Bank—a long-awaited homecoming for Yusra, and the first time Mo has laid eyes on his ancestral land. On arrival, they’re confronted with their relatives’ daily humiliations under Israeli occupation, the privations and genuine danger that seldom made headlines during “peacetime.” And yet, “Mo” never loses sight of Nadia’s assertion that “we’re more than our pain and suffering.” When Yusra suggests that they owe it to their fellow-Palestinians to dwell exclusively on such horrors, her daughter offers a gentle rebuttal: “We owe it to them to live, too.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
