Have you gotten around to watching Ramy yet? If not, why? It’s on Hulu, there are only two seasons, twenty episodes total, each about thirty minutes. It’s an easy binge!
The series was co-created by and stars Ramy Youssef, a surprise winner at the 2020 Golden Globes, one of the last awards shows before 1) the pandemic shut everything down, and 2) the HFPA was canceled. Ramy isn’t a phenomenon like, say, Fleabag, but it’s kind of a cult-hit TV show, and Ramy Youssef is keeping busy, expanding his resume and mogulizing his career. He’s a producer/ writer/ actor/ director on his own show, he is pulling double duty writing and producing a Netflix show with comedian Mohammed Amer, and now he’s set an animated series at Amazon Studios, the first project out of a first-look deal he’s signed with the platform.
Setting aside what it says about Hulu that Ramy Youssef has a first-look deal with a rival streaming service, the series, which already has a two-season order, sounds interesting. It’s set in the early 2000s and follows a Muslim-American family learning to navigate the post-9/11 landscape by code switching. I can only imagine how the concept of code switching will translate in a literally limitless creative landscape like animation, not unlike Big Mouth imagining puberty as literal monsters.
Also, for this show Youssef is working with journalist Mona Chalabi and Pam Brady, a writer and producer with a long list of MAJOR comedy credits, including The John Laroquette Show, South Park, The Loop, and Lady Dynamite, plus she wrote comedy cult classics Hot Rod and Hamlet 2. I MEAN. THAT is a career. I really cannot wait to see what the combination of Ramy Youssef, Mona Chalabi, and Pam Brady come up with.
