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12 hours ago
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One of the finest episodes of the peerless cringeathon that is Curb Your Enthusiasm is titled Palestinian Chicken. If you haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that Larry (Larry David) ends up at the centre of a tug of war between his new favourite restaurant (a Palestinian-owned chicken joint) and his largely Jewish group of friends, who think he’s committing treason. Chosen by David as his favourite ever episode, it deftly treads the most difficult of faultlines – injecting comedy where you least expect it, and highlighting the power of poultry to bring people together.
And so to the second – and apparently final – season of Mo, which is a spiritual successor to that Curb episode and surely one of the most heart-rending things you’ll watch on TV this year. It brings together food, identity, immigration, family and Middle Eastern politics in a way that’s as fresh and intriguing as the falafel tacos that become central to the plot.
The self-starring, semi-autobiographical vehicle of comic Mo Amer, the series was last on Netflix back in 2022. Its opening season introduced us to Mo Najjar, a refugee who – like the real-life Mo – had arrived in Houston, Texas, as a child when his Palestinian family fled the Gulf war. An immigration raid spooks Mo’s boss at a phone store, leaving him jobless and forced to sell knockoff goods out of his car – not fakes, he insists, but “high quality replicas”. His mom Yusra’s homemade olive oil offers a lifeline to their struggling family, but – like most things in Mo’s world – that business venture brings its own share of chaos. Perhaps that’s an understatement: by the final episode, Mo is stranded in Mexico, trying to outrun a people-smuggling coyote gang.
It’s in Mexico that season two begins, with Mo living it up as a lucha libre wrestler and playing with a mariachi band in scenes that have more than a touch of magical realism. Of course, he’s actually living in a world of pain, marooned in Mexico with no legal route to return to the US for his crucial asylum hearing, and separated from his beloved Mexican American girlfriend, Maria. It’s here that Amer highlights the horrifying reality of illegal border crossings and the desperate people who attempt them; later in the series, he intensifies his portrait of the boredom and petty harassment that characterises being “in the system”. But, being Mo, there’s a lightness to even the darkest of situations – not least when he attempts to forge a bond with a detention centre guard, sardonically asking whether his next stop in custody will be the bathroom from the horror film, Saw.
Once Mo returns to Texas, the two drivers of the series – moments that yank on your heartstrings and the cultural significance of food – interweave beautifully. His brother, Sameer, is trying his best to flog the family’s olive oil, despite his social and behavioural struggles. This time round, we go deeper into the character’s autism, with Omar Elba putting in a moving and nuanced performance as a 40-year-old man only just finding out why he has never felt at ease in the world, opposite Farah Bsieso as Yusra, consumed by worry and denial over her son’s diagnosis. Meanwhile, Maria (Teresa Ruiz) has not only moved on romantically from Mo, but has done so with Israeli-American chef Guy (played by the Jewish actor Simon Rex), whose business is booming and who has all the women in town swooning over him. Mo, of course, finds Guy’s cooking an affront to his culture, and becomes incandescent with rage as he barges into his lavish restaurant, full of happy customers and with a two-month-long waiting list. An angry showdown ensues between Maria’s suitors, in which Mo does himself no favours, but is also not helped by the similarity between the words “hummus” and “Hamas”, with bystanders hearing the latter instead of the former.
In a recent Guardian interview, Amer explained that it was crucial to end the events of the series prior to 7 October 2023, lest the tragedies suffered over the past 15 months overtake the story he has crafted. That isn’t to say that he has chosen to ignore current events, but rather that the struggle and pain of Mo and family – in the US and Palestine – remains its own tale, closely intertwined with but apart from a war that plays out in real time in the real world. Like its sister show Ramy (Amer appears in that series, while creator Ramy Youssef executive-produces this one), it excels in humanising people of all stripes, and in being as sidesplittingly funny as it is unapologetically dark. Its only fault – if there is one – is that it seems to end too soon, with loose ends still to tie up, and surely more screen time needed for unhinged patriot Hameed (Moayad Alnefaie). Still, if this is the final season after all, Mo at least leaves us with the feeling that all good meals do – full to the brim but still greedily eager for more.
