For those who weren’t around or don’t remember what the world was like after 9/11, there seemed to be a universal feeling of togetherness and camaraderie — unless you were Muslim. Then many people looked at you with suspicion, even if you waved the stars and stripes and had a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on your car. Ramy Youssef was was a ten-year-old living in New Jersey at the time, and his experiences are part of a new animated series that he created with Pam Brady (South Park).
Opening Shot: After a “REPRESENTATION WARNING” appears to tell viewers not to take these characters as representations of “MUSLIMS, ARABS, PEOPLE FROM NEW JERSEY,” and gives it a rating of “H” for “Haram”, we see closeups of “Hussein Hussein’s Halal Cart.”
The Gist: The cart is parked at a house in suburban New Jersey. We then see teenager Rumi Hussein (Ramy Youssef) putting on a massively-big basketball jersey that says “BALLS” on it instead of “BULLS”. He comes down to breakfast with his father Hussein (Youssef), mother Sharia (Salma Hindy) and older sister Mona (Alia Shawkat); also living with them is his burqa-wearing, TV-loving Grandma (Randa Jarrar), and his super-traditional, cigarette-smoking Grandpa (Azhar Usman). The date is September 10, 2001.
Hussein was never going to buy Rumi a real Bulls jersey because it’s too expensive. As it is, Hussein tallies up each household member’s expenses, down to the electricity and amount of toilet paper they use. Rumi is also last on the “cousin leaderboard.”
Rumi is wearing the jersey because he has a crush on his teacher, Mrs. Malcolm (Mandy Moore), who wistfully talks to her class about an affair she had with Michael Jordan — probably, because she can’t say due to an NDA. It’s not an unrequited crush, though, and he hopes to sway her with his kick-ass presentation about his family’s home country, Egypt, the next day — 9/11.
Hussein shows his brother, Ahmed (Paul Elia), who’s moving in with the family, his halal cart, parked right in front of News Corp headquarters. Business is good, and Hussein has big plans to expand. As appreciation for letting him move in, Ahmed brings Hussein a lamb he can slaughter. Ahmed, for his part, kills some street pigeons for dinner back in New Jersey.
At dinner, Mona tries to get up the nerve that she’s in love with her best friend Gina (Megan Stalter), but Grandpa has a heart attack and dies before she gets the chance. Grandma insists that Grandpa be buried back in Cairo, but Hussein feels that’s way too expensive, and looks to have everything taken care of by a Pakistani mosque in Freehold. Everything the next morning, though, gets put aside when planes fly into the Twin Towers. After that, Hussein’s goal is to make his family the most American-seeming family around.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Ramy Yussef and Pam Brady, #1 Happy Family USA is a cross between Ramy and either South Park or Family Guy.
Our Take: In the first few minutes of #1 Happy Family USA, the impression is that it’s going to be just another gag-a-second adult-animated series that toes the line of offensiveness. But as the episode goes along, and you know what the Hussein family is going to have to deal with starting the morning after we first meet them, the show becomes a bit more bittersweet.
Sure, there’s a musical number at the end of the episode, with Hussein and his family loudly projecting to their neighbors that they are the “#1 Happy Family USA!” But that certainly speaks to the Muslim-American experience in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It didn’t matter if you wore the stars and stripes on your sleeve; if you were Muslim, you were regarded with suspicion — or worse. Youssef was a kid in 2001, and it must have been disconcerting for him back then. We’re sure that confusion will be something we see from Rumi as well.
Brady, who worked on South Park, brings that show’s anarchic dynamic to #1 Happy Family USA. But even when the show is at its silliest, there’s going to be that undercurrent that points out just how much of an Islamophobic society we were back then (not that we’re much better now, but it was pretty intense in the months and years after 9/11).
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Even as they’re singing about being “#1 Happy Family USA!”, the FBI pulls up and takes out their guns. “Please don’t shoot,” Hussein begs as he holds Rumi up. “Take the boy.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Randa Jarrar as Grandma, if only because her character is so comically bonded to her TV, she buckles it into the family van when she takes her husband’s body to the airport to take Delta to Cairo (what are the odds that she’ll be back in Newark Airport pretty quickly, given how that day went?).
Most Pilot-y Line: One of Rumi’s classmates warns that if he’s not careful, he’ll be stuck in the “Student Zone” with Mrs. Malcom. “That’s like the ‘friend zone’, but with homework.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. #1 Happy Family USA is a bit uneven in the comedy department, but we’ll forgive that because whatever humor that comes out of the Hussein family’s attempts to blend into American society should be funnier than just one-off gags.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.