Warning: Spoilers ahead for season two of Mo.
Early in season two of Mo, Mo Amer's comedy of errors about a Palestinian refugee navigating the byzantine U.S. immigration system, protagonist Mo Najjar finds himself in a tight spot. Following a series of mishaps, he ends up accidentally stuck in Mexico for months—since he’s undocumented and currently waiting on his asylum decision to come through, he can’t readily get back home to Houston. After he flubs an opportunity to return home, Mo decides to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Mo has barely set foot in Texas when a group of vigilantes find him. As they level their rifles, Mo puts his hands up—then puts on his best east Houston drawl and starts singing Hank Williams’ “Family Business.”
The tense scene, as with much of the show itself, draws on true facets of Amer’s own life. Years back, Amer—who, like his eponymous character, fled Kuwait with his Palestinian family in the 1990s and sought asylum while living in the Houston area for decades—was in Mexico when he had a gun drawn on him by local authorities. The police instructed him to lift up his shirt. Amer obliged. With the weapons still pointed at him, Amer put his shirt back down, motioned towards his belly, and muttered: “Muchos tacos.”
While recounting the story over the phone a few weeks ago, Amer still seems stunned that he went there at that moment. “Like, what kind of moron says that?” he laughs. “The two soldiers started grinning a little bit, and then the sergeant’s like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I can't explain it. It just came out of my mouth.” (They eventually let him go.)
For Amer, humor is a means of navigating moments of extreme tension, even tragedy. “That’s how I’ve always dealt with anything. It's a survival thing, really,” Amer tells GQ. “You just laugh at it, in a pure [effort] to let the air out.”
That ethos is precisely what makes Mo such a compelling watch. The second season, which recently dropped on Netflix, doubles down on the stark realities of being an asylum seeker who has long called the U.S. home, and remains in immigration limbo. The show unsparingly probes the casual cruelty of detention centers that render refugees as criminals; the unmooring feeling of left behind by the world, and loved ones, without being to move forward on a personal or professional level that can arise during that years-long process; gnarly inter-generational tensions that exist amidst conversations about mental health; the feeling of perhaps never being able to return to one’s beloved family homeland; and mourning a deceased spouse. The grief is thick.
Yet Mo remains more comedy than drama, nimbly imbuing a sense of pathos with well-balanced strains of genuine hilarity. The show’s ingenuity stems from the way Amer, who co-created the show with fellow comedian Ramy Yousef, manages to plumb humor from unthinkably difficult situations—a complex needle-threading that especially emerges midway through season two. One standout episode, entitled “Thank You Jesus,” had me laughing so hard I got misty the first time I watched it. Despite it taking on a slew of heavy themes, Amer viewed this episode as the season’s “pressure reliever” that also set breadcrumbs for the remainder of the episodes. As the episode’s writer Jacqui Rivera sees it, episode five also lets “Mo do what Mo does absolutely the best: Be hilarious in uncomfortable situations.”
At this point in the series, Mo’s life can’t seem to get any more hellish. His impromptu Hank Williams karaoke at the border lands him in a detention center cage, where he’s packed in with other undocumented immigrants including a guy that, for some reason, won’t stop meowing. When Mo is finally able to return home to Houston, he’s immediately deported—though he gets to stay in the US on a technicality—and must wear an ankle monitor until the system decides what to do with him. As Mo becomes increasingly anxious about the prospect of being able to join his mom and brother in eventually seeing their extended family in Palestine, he finds his positive attitude waning. In episode five, he then gets mixed up in a hare-brained scheme concocted by two of his childhood buddies: Getting Mo hitched to a friend's wife's sister for green card purposes.
A goal of season two, Amer says, was always to get his character to Palestine; although these episodes take place in the weeks leading up to October 7th, the ongoing war in Gaza and the toll it takes on Mo’s family are omnipresent elements in the show. “So then how you get there is everything,” he says. “At this point [Mo is] out of options. He has to get married to get out of this pickle and get him this green card to allow him to actually travel.”
In the weeks since Mo’s second season came out on Netflix, green cards (which have long granted noncitizens permanent resident status and the ability to live and work in the United States) have become an inflection point in the Trump administration’s dual aspirations to deport immigrants and stamp out dissent. Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian man and Columbia University graduate student who is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.—and asserted the U.S. government's supposed right, under a rarely-used principle of immigration law, to revoke his green card in response to Khalil's pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia; he was transported from New York to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana and is now facing deportation.
Amer’s own immigration lawyer consulted in the Mo writers’ room so the creative team could understand the nuances of what actually happens during that process—including the unusually common form of deportation known as being released on one’s own recognizance, wherein someone is released from detention but is hamstrung in other ways. “After that happens to you, it's almost impossible to reverse,” Amer says. “And then essentially…if you do anything wrong, if you get in trouble, you're a goner. They could put you back in a detention center for God knows how long. You don't have any rights anymore.”
Rivera says that in showing the “constant dread of the refugee experience and the bureaucratic obstacle course for citizenship,” the series is animated by a larger question that has no easy answer: “How do you succeed in a system that's designed to keep you out?” But even that becomes fodder for comedy in Mo: In one scene from the episode, Mo is trying to open an account at a credit union. When the bank employee balks wordlessly at Mo’s beeping ankle monitor, Mo quips, with flawless comedic timing: “It’s not criminal…it is. It’s nonviolent.”
Faced with dwindling options until he awaits his fate, Mo tries to do one thing that’s at least in his control: Moving out of his mother’s house—where he feels a little cramped—and decamping to his friend Hameed’s place for a little while after hearing he gets his own en suite bathroom. Hameed (played by the incredibly funny Moayad Alnefaie) and Dallas (Shasta Brooke) welcome Mo to their low-slung, wood-paneled house in Pasadena, an east-side suburb of Houston. To his horror, Mo realizes that he’ll be sleeping in the creepy doll-festooned bed where Dallas’s mom took her final breath; her oxygen tank is still shoved into a corner of the room. “I was thinking to myself, like, What's the most nightmare of situations? Like, yeah! Let it be this mother in law who's deceased now, [and] have the bedpan and some of the hospital equipment still there,” Amer says. “We just really wanted to put [Mo] in the worst possible situation.”
That moment isn’t helped by Hameed giving Mo a tour of all the secret crannies in the house where he stores all of his guns—including in a wall clock, behind a U.S. flag painting, and a tissue box, which stemmed from Amer perusing an odd Pinterest rabbithole of creative places to store weapons. He mentioned some of the posts to Rivera, who ran with it and wrote gut-busting lines for Hameed, a proud U.S. immigrant and gun owner based on someone Amer knew growing up in Houston. “You want to travel, you want to go somewhere?” Hameed asks Mo, showing him a wooden globe…before opening it up to reveal a resting place for a grenade. “Ha, you go to hell, baby!”
That night, Mo has a discomfiting dream that involves him seeing his grandmother delivering him a cryptic message, and receiving a key to his family’s home in Palestine. He’s then woken up by Austin (Johanna Braddy)—Dallas’s sister—who’s made him breakfast in bed while not-so-subtly implying that she’s down to marry Mo in his time of need. After hitting it off with Austin during a flirty game of beanbag toss, Mo begins to seriously consider the possibility that this marriage would solve a lot of his issues.
In a lucky twist, the early 2024 production for season two of Mo coincided with the Houston Rodeo, a month-long extravaganza of carnival rides, fried foods, and headlining concerts that have become a rite of passage for Texas musicians since Selena’s famous purple-jumpsuited performance there in 1995. Amer, who’d always wanted to use the rodeo as a setting in the show, used it as the locale for his character’s first date with Austin. (Shooting that day was a little chaotic: “No one on set could figure out who were the extras and who was actually at the rodeo,” Rivera laughs.)
Of course, Mo can’t just enjoy a sunny day of eating barbecue and making out with Austin. At the rodeo’s barbecue competition, Mo runs into his ex-girlfriend Maria (Teresa Ruiz) — a breakup that Mo still smarts from, partially because he considers her choice in a new boyfriend a betrayal: An Israeli chef named Guy, played by Simon Rex. That encounter eventually leads to a confrontation wherein Mo and Guy lob increasingly hilarious insults at each other that also cut deeper. First, Mo accuses Guy of being a culture vulture with his food. “Oh, you just steal from everybody?” he asks. Guy, in turn, dismisses Mo’s cowboy hat: “That hat looks weird on you. Did you pick that out for him at Cowboys R Us?” Austin also jumps in and goes for the jugular, telling Guy that his brisket looks “a little dry.”
“The banter between Mo and Guy is also an opportunity to let out a little of Mo’s steam regarding Maria's betrayal,” says Rivera. “And also just the deeper hurt that he's always carrying, whether it's conscious or unconscious.” But the writers of the show, and Amer, also wanted to underscore that Mo is often his own worst enemy. “Mo can't get out of his own way,” Amer explains. “He's not really a victim in this whole situation. He's just constantly stepping on his own toes.” That quality gets Mo into more than a few mishaps on the show—including the end of episode five, where Mo’s holding a ring in his hands and Austin sees it, prompting an accidental proposal—and also helps balance the series’ grim scenarios with a bit of levity.
Every moment in the show, whether it’s devastating, hysterically funny, or both at once, is grounded by Amer’s unbreakable faith that things will work themselves out, as he puts it. “Because if you lose faith, then you have nothing.” With everything he’s gone through in his life, Amer has chosen instead to hold onto that idea, an “understanding and believing in something that is just way bigger than you.”
The future of Mo remains unclear, and there aren’t any further seasons planned after this one. Amer is open to revisiting the story should that opportunity arise, but he admits that putting the series together took a lot out of him, considering that so much of it is drawn from his life experiences, his family history, and his own pain. “I’m gonna be honest with you, I genuinely still ache after making this season,” Amer says. “I put every ounce of energy, spirit, mind, body, into it. And I'm still hurting from it. It’s just not something that was easy to make on so many different levels.”
But being on the other side of this process makes him feel like he’s “fulfilled a big purpose” in his life, he adds. “I have so much more to do and give in the art of storytelling and film and television. This one happens to be my story. Imagine what I could do with somebody else's.”