On a farm about 45 minutes outside of Houston, a one-eyed horse stared warily at a man who had no business near a barn, livestock or hay. The city slicker in the paddock wiping manure off his shoe was Mohammed “Mo” Amer, the Palestinian-Texan comedian behind Netflix‘s acclaimed comedy “Mo.”
It was last spring and Amer was on location for the second and final season of his eponymous series, directing an episode set on an olive farm. “That’s like the third time today I’ve stepped in it. My people just can’t catch a break,” he jokes.
By “his people,” he meant Palestinians, of course. Amer’s humor is steeped in the plight of his displaced family, his dreams of returning to a homeland he’s never seen and his unique background as a Texas-raised Arab with a penchant for Mexican food and a knack for screwing things up.
Playing a semiautobiographical version of himself named Mo Najjar, Amer returned to Netflix Thursday with eight new 30-minute episodes of “Mo.” In the series, which he co-created with Ramy Youssef (“Ramy,” “Poor Things”), Amer mines the pain, joy and absurdity of his character’s circumstance as a Houston-raised Palestinian refugee seeking asylum and citizenship in the U.S. “Just in time for the cease-fire,” quipped the 43-year-old during a recent follow-up video call.
Mo Amer on the set of his show.
(Eddy Chen / Netflix)
Amer’s years as a stand-up comedian taught him that the sharpest humor often comes from the worst circumstances, and there’s been no shortage of material. He and his team were working on the show’s second season in 2023 when Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attack, killing approximately 1,200 people in Israel. The IDF responded with a 15-month bombardment of Gaza that has killed at least 47,000 people, according to figures released by the IDF and the Gaza Health Ministry.
“The subject matter of the show is already so heavy,” says Amer, who co-directed the series. “Then to make matters a million times worse, there’s what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, and everyone’s input of what I should or shouldn’t be doing about it. I’ve had to be super patient and meticulous about focusing on what I can control in this madness. And this [show] is one of the things that I could control.”
Season 2 of “Mo” picks up where it left off in 2022, with Mo stuck in Mexico after a debacle that involved stolen olive trees and a drug cartel. He can’t get back into the U.S. without a passport or proof of citizenship, neither of which he has despite decades of trying to legally navigate the U.S. immigration system.
In Season 2, we see Mo cross the border and get held at an ICE detention center.
(Eddy Chen / Netflix)
Drawing on his hustling skills, he’s now selling falafel tacos from a cart in Mexico City. After blowing an easy opportunity to gain entry to the U.S. through a Mexican diplomat, he pays a coyote to cross illegally, wading through the Rio Grande with immigrant families before ending up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.
“We’ve heard so much about detention centers but we’ve never really seen inside, and certainly not in a half-hour comedy,” Amer says. “So we thought, let’s explore it and the sliding scale of each person’s experience of getting to America. When he’s locked up, Mo overhears one of the other immigrants talking about his journey: ‘The mud slides, the snakes, the jungle, the cartel. And that’s just to get to Panama.’ Then Mo is asked what it was like for him, and he’s kind of embarrassed to say, ‘Oh, I took the bus.’”
Mo does make it back to Houston, where he finds that his girlfriend, Maria (Teresa Ruiz), is dating another man — and he’s Jewish. Mo is also no closer to getting his case through the courts, and he’s randomly ordered to wear an ankle bracelet while awaiting asylum in case he tries to flee to … well, that’s unclear. When his mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), and his brother Sameer (Omar Elba) are finally granted citizenship, Mo’s fight to gain asylum becomes all the more critical. The series then takes us from the Texas olive farm where they work to checkpoints in Israel and finally, the family home on the West Bank.
The big question for Amer and the team was how to address the real-world tragedy in Israel and the Palestinian territories on the show.
“Rather than going on a hyper political rant, we had the ability to just let the show speak for itself and let the art do the work, so that’s what we did,” says Amer about the debate about whether to incorporate the Oct. 7 attack on the show.
(Eddy Chen / Netflix)
“We spent time a lot of time talking about whether or not we would want to change the story to cover what was happening and it almost felt like, how could we not?” says “Mo” executive producer Harris Danow in an interview on the set last spring. “But we had already built out our story beforehand. We were pretty far down the line, so there was no way to adequately address it without upending everything we’d already done, which gave me a panic attack. Obviously things after Oct. 7 changed dramatically. But the larger point that we were trying to make, the issues that the show was dealing with, didn’t really change. It’s just the scale of it escalated to a horrific level.”
“Rather than going on a hyper political rant, we had the ability to just let the show speak for itself and let the art do the work, so that’s what we did,” Amer adds.
“Mo” hilariously tackles fraught topics such as cultural appropriation , like when Maria’s new boyfriend sets Mo off by replicating his falafel taco idea (a recipe in itself that steals from Mexican culture). It also grapples with impossibly polarizing subject matter.
When Yusra is relentlessly grilled by an Israeli customs agent on her first trip back home since her family fled the region in the 1960s, she has just one question for her interrogator:
“Where are you from?” she asks the agent.
“I’m Israeli.”
“No, I mean where did your grandparents came [sic] from?”
“My grandparents are from Spain.”
“Spain? I was born here,” Yusra says. “My family was born here. Yet you are questioning me.”
“What was your point?”
“Point was made.”
Farah Bsieso plays Yusra, Mo’s mother, on the show.
(Eddy Chen / Netflix)
Back on the farm outside Houston, the “Mo” set was a microcosm of Amer’s cross-cultural existence. Black bean chipotle hummus was among the offerings in the craft services area. The crew donned cowboy hats and keffiyehs to shield themselves from the sun. And most everyone was feeling the pressure of working on the first and only comedy to portray a Palestinian American. “It’s the only show of its kind and this season ups the only-ness,” said series co-director and executive producer Solvan “Slick” Naim. “There’s a lot on the table.”
“It’s very important we present things in a way that doesn’t immediately shut people down from listening,” Danow says. “There are just certain things you can say or politicize, and it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, I know exactly what this is. Why do I need to keep watching? I can just go to the well — TikTok or Instagram — and engage in that.’ The whole thing is a trap because it obscures the larger issue, which to me is all about dehumanization.”
Directing and acting, Amer worked on various scenes that straddled the line between tragedy and comedy. His exhausted character falls asleep and dreams of statehood, only to fall out of his hammock into a pile of (simulated) manure. He treks across a beautiful field … in a humiliating ankle bracelet.
“I always imagine scenarios where you can influence culture, put something out for the culture in a way that’s impactful,” Amer says. “I feel like this does that, especially when you can share something that’s not just like doom and gloom and death and destruction. It’s something that can actually be celebrated, something that’s relatable, something that’s real, something that’s grounded, and something that can shed a different light on this Palestinian family.”
