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The first episode of the Netflix comedy-drama Moe showcases the abilities of its lead character, Mohammed Najjar. He’s set up a parking lot, peddling “real counterfeit goods” — fake designer sunglasses, Rolex watches, and Gucci belts — from the trunk of his 1970 Ford Torino when an older white man in a cowboy hat walks by. Despite their differences, he’s an easy target for Moe, a burly Palestinian who can sympathize with his bad back in an accent that wasn’t there just moments ago. At first, the older customer dismisses Moe’s offer of Yeezy foam slippers as “alien shoes” — but moments later, he walks away satisfied, having purchased not only the Yeezys but also a fake Chanel handbag for his wife.
Moe is aware that he has the ability to persuade, disarm, and charm people. His quick reflexes have been an important resource for his family from an early age: one memorable episode of their escape from Kuwait during the Gulf War shows a young Moe distracting border guards with crocodile tears and a Ninja Turtle action figure. The Najjars eventually ended up in Houston, where Moe has adapted in his own way. He speaks three languages—English, Arabic, and Spanish—and in the first season, he has a Mexican-American girlfriend named Maria (Teresa Ruiz), whom he teaches coarse words in his native tongue. But the biggest obstacle in his life remains his asylum case, which has been pending for more than two decades, preventing him from finding legal work or seeing loved ones abroad—an obstacle that can’t be solved by talking or showing humanity. Even Moe can’t charm his way out of.
The first season of Mo premiered in the summer of 2022, borrowing liberally from the life and family history of its co-creator and star, comedian Mohammed Amer. (Like the Najjars, the Amers moved frequently, leaving Palestine, then Kuwait, then the United States; like the fictional Mo, Amer sold counterfeit goods.) Three years later, as the show’s second and final season rolls around, it feels even more relevant. The second season begins in 2022 and ends before October 7 and the events that followed in Gaza—perhaps too heavy a subject for this show to tackle directly. Still, eight new episodes, written in 2023 and filmed in 2024, obliquely address the helplessness and grief felt by the Palestinian diaspora as they watch tragedy unfold on the other side of the world.
The Peabody Award-winning Moe shares many of the same themes as other recent immigrant-family comedies, like the rebooted One Day at a Time and Ramy, created by Mo co-creator Ramy Youssef. But the unifying theme of the series is statelessness. The clever way the first season handled this unusual political situation was to superimpose it on a familiar sitcom trope about a thirtysomething struggling to find his identity. Because Moe himself can’t move on, he puts other aspects of his life on hold. He won’t marry Maria after years of dating, presumably waiting for her to renounce her faith for Islam, which he knows she won’t do. And he doesn’t want to upset his widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), with whom he continues to live, hiding from her not only his haram tattoo but also a stray bullet wound he received during a grocery shopping mishap. (She eventually discovers both—and is, naturally, more upset about the tattoo.) Perhaps Mo clings so tightly to his heritage and the idea of a lost homeland in part because he was denied citizenship and belonging in the country where he spent most of his life. Either way, he can be a real jerk to people he considers cultural traitors, including his sister Nadia (Cherienne Dabis), who married a white man—even if both Nadia and her young son Osama are better at Arabic and Islamic history than Mo.
The result is a funny, fast-paced, and unpredictable story; it’s also a deft character study that shows how the creaking bureaucracy of the asylum system can warp even good-natured people, delaying their dreams and curtailing their opportunities. But Moe is deft enough to occasionally project some of his own shortcomings onto his situation. Part of the show’s greatness is that you can’t quite pinpoint where the personal ends and the political begins.
The first season was a holistic look at Moe's life and how it unraveled, culminating, after a series of mistakes, in a nightmare scenario that leaves him stranded on the wrong side of the Mexican border, unable to return to the U.S. The second season, directed in part by Amer himself, is a more lighthearted, sad, and twisted follow-up. Moe finds his way home, but at a cost. Not having
Sourse: newyorker.com
