Dealing with a major, untimely death in the family has been fodder for drama and comedy for years, but there seems to be more of it in the last decade or so. Perhaps it’s because of the success of This Is Us, or maybe it’s just because we’re all feeling our mortality in one way or another. Anyway, a new series from Egypt combines the heartbreak of losing a loved one with the comedy of figuring out how to be a parent in 2025..
Opening Shot: A car slowly pulls into a cemetery in Egypt.
The Gist: Youssef (Mohamed Farag) has brought his wife Amina (Riham Abdel Ghafour) there to show her the grave he wants to buy. She thinks this whole thing is maudlin, but he wants to be prepared. The broker who is selling the grave to Youssef recognizes Amina from her YouTube channel, “Amina’s Catalog,” where she gives parenting advice.
Youssef goes down with the broker to see the tomb. When we see him come back up, he’s distraught. It’s one year later, and Youssef has just put Amina in that tomb; she passed away after an illness that he truly thought she’d recover from.
Youssef, his older daughter Karima (Rital Abdelaziz) and younger son Mansour (Ali El Beialy) come back to the family’s empty apartment and try to contemplate life without Amina. One of the issues is that Youssef has been a workaholic through much of the kids’ lives, and has left the day-to-day parenting chores to Amina. This becomes apparent right away when Mansour talks about his “meal plan,” which is detailed on an iPad his mom hid somewhere in the apartment.
Suffice to say, Youssef is completely overwhelmed by what he needs to do to parent his kids. He gets some help and advice from his brother Hanafi (Khaled Kamal), a rather gruff man who is also Mansour’s soccer coach; he tells Youssef to treat this like how he learned to swim, with Hanafi tossing him in the deep end of the pool. Amina’s brother Osama (Ahmed Essam Elsayed) comes to stay with the family, but he isn’t much more capable of taking care of kids than Youssef is.
Youssef has no idea that he needs to leave the office to pick his kids up from school. He forgets to pack them lunch, and ends up buying the lunches from other kids. He has no idea Mansour is allergic to ketchup, and the other kid’s lunch makes his son break out. Karima wants him to record a video for Amina’s channel to tell her viewers what happened. Karima ends up doing it herself, and as he watches the video, he goes back to look at Amina’s first one on the channel, and realizes she can turn to her for parenting advice via Amina’s Catalog.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Catalog is a gentle, family-oriented dramedy that is supposed to pull at the heartstrings. In a lot of ways, it’s This Is Us with a much more straightforward timeline.
Our Take: One of the things we kept trying to get past while watching the first episode of Catalog is how truly disconnected Youssef is to his kids’ lives when Amina passes away. We’re supposed to believe that Youssef is such a workaholic that he just didn’t have time to manage the kids’ day-to-day. But the way he’s portrayed isn’t as much a disconnected dad as he is an absent one.
Yes, we get how Youssef is going to build his parenting skills and reconnect with his kids and the joys of being involved in their lives. But the idea that he has no idea about his son’s allergies or he objects to the fact that he has to pick his kids up in the middle of the work day just rubs us the wrong way. He even fobs off participation in the “mommies group” on social media to his assistant.
At first, we thought this cluelessness might be cultural. However, a scene where Youssef talks to another dad at soccer practice and learns that the man goes to his kid’s practices because that’s what you do when your a father made us think otherwise. Twenty-first century parenting, even in Egypt, is way too complex for one parent to not be involved. We want to know more about how Youssef ended disconnecting, if Amina was OK with it, and why he didn’t even try to jump in and do what he needed to do for his kids when she was sick.
Without even a smidgen of that information, it’s hard to get completely on board with Youssef’s transformation. The writing has a lot of character-driven humor in it, and the moments when he makes connections, whether it’s with his kids or even his gruff brother Hanafi, are actually well-written and well-earned. We’re even fans of the idea that Youssef is going to learn how to be a good parent via Amina’s videos. But without knowing why and how Youssef ended up disconnecting from his family in such a complete way, the story is going to feel a little hollow.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Sitting at Amina’s grave, Youssef watches his late wife’s introductory video and realizes she can help him even though she’s not around anymore.
Sleeper Star: Khaled Kamal is great as Hanafi, because he seems like such a tough, matter-of-fact guy. But with his nephew Mansour he’s as warm as could be, and the advice he gives his brother Youssef about being a captain on the “team” that is his family was quite heartfelt.
Most Pilot-y Line: Youssef has used an imaginary scapegoat named Fouli ever since he was in college, says his business partner Tamer (Sedky Sakhr). That joke feels clever at first, but Fouli comes up again later in the episode, which already feels like it’s too much.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the notion that we’d like more information about why Youssef was able to get away with being such a disconnected parent, we still enjoyed the arc that he experiences in Catalog, which has some truly funny and heartfelt moments.
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.