There’s Nothing Else Like Netflix’s Mo

On Mo, the Netflix dramedy about a family of Palestinian refugees living in Houston, national labels are of deep importance. Throughout the series, Mohammed Najjar (played by Mohammed “Mo” Amer) struggles to hold on to employment—and any sense of security—because he’s not yet a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. His situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the American government, and many people he encounters, doesn’t recognize his family’s homeland as a legitimate state.

Early in the show’s second and final season, which premiered at the end of January, this sense of placelessness manifests in a frustrating conversation with a powerful diplomat. Mo, who is undocumented, has inadvertently traveled to Mexico and can’t legally return to Texas; he gains an unlikely audience with an American ambassador who offers to help him. But when the politician tries toasting to “your safe return and a peaceful end to the conflict,” gesturing toward unrest in Palestine, Mo can’t stop himself from challenging the nebulous characterization. His indignation gets him thrown out of the ambassador’s house, all but guaranteeing that Mo won’t get home in time for the Najjars’ long-awaited asylum hearing. After two decades spent in legal limbo, Mo once again has to come to terms with his indefinite future as a stateless person. Despite how naturally he seems to inhabit and move between multiple identities—Palestinian, American, racially ambiguous Texan—he can’t lay claim to any of them under the law.

This toggling sense of identity is crucial to how the characters of Mo see themselves—and in a recent conversation, Amer (who co-created the semi-autobiographical series with Ramy Youssef) told me the tense exchange with the ambassador is one of his favorites. The disagreement confirms Mo’s character: He’s steadfast in his Palestinian identity, but he’s also brash and prideful in ways that routinely get him in trouble. As Amer put it to me, “He’s willing to ruin his own life to make sure that he’s staying true to it, trying to stay true to himself.” The moment is just one example of how Mo tells an honest, complicated, and, most important, funny story about a Palestinian American family—and the territorial limbo that shapes their lives, even as they live thousands of miles away.

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Shows about undocumented people are still rare, and Mo was the first American series to fully focus on a family of Palestinian protagonists. But the newest episodes were made in a particularly fraught climate. Mo’s writers started working on the second season a month before the dual Hollywood strikes began in May 2023. They reconvened that October, just days before Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. The mounting death toll in Palestine put the show’s writers in a difficult position. Some viewers may have felt that Mo had a responsibility to address the escalating violence; others could be reflexively uncomfortable with hearing the words settler or occupation, language that pops up periodically in the show’s dialogue, sometimes in heated debates that Mo then defuses with humor.  

Instead of taking on the news directly, the season follows a main arc that Mo’s writers began developing back in April 2023, Amer told me. It continues a storyline from Season 1, when Mo’s widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), started a small olive-oil business called 1947—after the last year before the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians after the state of Israel was created. Yusra was born in Palestine, but spent much of her life away from it. After settlers took over her parents’ land in Haifa, her family fled to the West Bank, where many of her relatives still live. Yusra later left for Kuwait with her husband; when the Gulf War broke out, the couple moved once more, to Texas. Whenever Yusra talks about the olive oil she bottles in Texas, her longing for home is obvious—but so is her commitment to creating something from the pain of the protracted separation from her relatives, whom she hasn’t seen in decades.  

When we spoke, Amer recalled an aunt in Palestine shipping him some homemade olive oil and apologizing for not sending more; settlement blockades had prevented the family from accessing some of their olive groves. Still, he said, it was important to her to send what she could. That same sentiment is palpable when the Najjars finally make it to their family’s groves in Burin in Season 2, where they sing, eat, and commune with their loved ones under the shade of the olive trees. Despite the ever-present threat of violence from settlers and military authorities surrounding the groves, they rejoice because they’re together on the land. It’s one of the show’s most affecting scenes, and an uncommon representation of life in this region. Warm snapshots of life in Palestine are a rare sight in American media and pop culture, where images of Palestinians most often circulate alongside chronicles of conflict and devastation.  

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To the extent that Mo’s depiction of violence in the West Bank or the pains of refugee life feels especially timely, it’s largely a reflection of how much American awareness has shifted since October 7. But Amer has also said the creative team’s personal griefs are sublimated in this season, in a way that enhances the show’s resonance. This season, Yusra and her daughter, Nadia, lovingly disagree over the former’s constant attention to harrowing news back home—a dynamic that is incredibly familiar to Cherien Dabis, the Palestinian American actor who plays Nadia. In October 2023, Dabis, who is also a filmmaker, was in Palestine working on a historical drama about a family displaced from Jaffa in 1948. She was forced to evacuate, and to put the feature on hold, all while overwhelmed with fear about what would happen—so the news was always on. As she explained at a recent Mo screening in New York City, “The show was like a container for so many of us to come together and talk about what we were feeling during that incredibly intense, horrific time that is not over and didn’t just begin.”

The show’s portrait of the Najjars conveys the existential stakes of their statelessness, but it also highlights the beauty of the relationships they’ve been able to forge. Because the people who love him take Mo—and the Najjars’ struggles—seriously, they aren’t afraid to point out that Mo doesn’t always wind up in hot water because he’s valiantly defending his heritage or standing up for justice in the world. Sometimes, Mo really does seem to be crumbling under the pressures of life in a country where neither his heritage nor his local bona fides are respected. But he’s often just being an impatient, inconsiderate jerk. One of the delights of watching Mo is how clearly the series engages with all of its characters’ complexities—Palestinians, the show’s blundering protagonist included, don’t have to be perfect to hold our attention.