One Last Rodeo

Palestinian American stand-up comic Mo Amer made a Netflix series loosely based on his experience. Just as he was writing the final season, October 7 happened.

- Roxana Hadadi

SEASON TWO OF MO, the Netflix series co-created by, starring, and inspired by the life of the Palestinian American comedian Mohammed "Mo" Amer, was filmed, and partially written, after October 7, 2023. When the writers reconvened after that date, they tried to incorporate the Israel-Hamas war into the narrative. "Every scene became really didactic, and this wasn't the show," Amer tells me. The season doesn't directly address the war over its eight episodes; instead, Palestine is a steady thrum in the background of the characters' lives that serves as a source of sadness, hope, and sitcom shenanigans. In the first season, which debuted in August 2022, Mo Najjar is a part-time strip-club DJ and bootleg salesman attempting to make ends meet in Houston, where he lives with his mother (Farah Bsieso) and autistic elder brother (Omar Elba). Along with relationship drama with Mo's on-again, offagain Mexican American girlfriend (Teresa Ruiz) and high jinks with his cast of multicultural friends, the show depicts a family in flux, trying to start an olive-oil business as they seek asylum. Mo-a refugee without travel documents-can be a purposefully frustrating character, prone to losing his temper and clinging to farfetched dreams. After a series of missteps, he ends up stuck in Mexico with no way to make it back home to Houston. In the series' second and reportedly final season, he blows his chance for a legal return to Houston when he meets the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and can't help but pick a fight after the ambassador uses the word conflict to describe the situation in Israel and Palestine. Later in the second season, Mo has to deal with the consequences of being officially deported, a decision that endangers his ability to ever visit his family in the West Bank. The season culminates with the episode "A Call From God," in which Mo, his mother, and his brother travel for the first time together to Palestine. Many elements of the finale, which was filmed in Malta with