Netflix's Mo season two: A case of diminishing returns

After 7 October 2023, the eyes of the Arab-American community were on Palestinian comedian Mohammed Amer and his response to the ensuing genocide in Gaza and silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.  

Amer made history by starring in, writing, and co-producing America’s first comedy series centred on a Palestinian family. 

Produced by A24 and co-created by Ramy Youssef, America’s other prominent Arab comedian, Mo landed on Netflix in 2022 to rave reviews from both critics, including this writer, and high-profile celebrities, including Steven Spielberg and Jon Stewart. 

Amer became an unlikely voice of Palestinian America: an earnest, loveable chronicler of the numbing statelessness defining Palestinian experience. 

The painful honesty of Mo was a breath of fresh air at a time when various Arab-Americans tried and mostly floundered in capturing the elusive zeitgeist of the time. 

The anticipation on Amer to shoulder the responsibility of voicing the anguish of the Arab-American populace in the aftermath of 7 October was unrealistic, however. 

Amer was certainly active in pinpointing the horrors in Gaza, but he was careful in what he shared and wrote, avoiding the ire that met the more strident critics like Susan Sarandon, Melissa Barrera, Jonathan Glazer, and even fellow Palestinian-American, Bella Hadid. 

Given that caution, many presumed that Amer might channel his distress and grief into tackling 7 October head-on in the second season of Mo. 

After all, how can you tell a contemporary Palestinian tale without addressing the big elephant in the room?

As it turned out, Amer did manage to elude the subject. 

Amer recently revealed that he did toy with the idea of integrating October 7 in the new season, but found the treatment “too didactic”. 

Nevertheless, the avoidance of 7 October is not what renders Mo 2 such a disappointment, but rather the over-simplicity and predictability of Amer’s discourse. 

Make no mistake, Amer remains an expert in seamlessly balancing pathos with humour; in evoking the incongruity of the Palestinian condition in the diaspora; in intermittently mobilising the tenacious Palestinian spirit in the face of erasure. 

That’s what season one astutely and commendably managed to achieve. 

Season two is more of the same; it sticks to its formula, closely adhering to the narrow parameters Amer set for his story, and never daring to advance or deepen the conversation about the grand and complicated Palestinian affliction. 

It is oddly tamer, tidier, and brighter than its rather dark predecessor. 

Unfulfilled potential

Mo 2 is undeniably sincere, remarkably piercing in parts, and still funny as hell. But it’s also highly uneven, reductive, and strangely conciliatory.

It’s a Netflix series through and through: a highly American TV show that illustrates the strain and limitations of a very local Arab-American experience with receding universal echoes. 

And for this reviewer, it’s by far the most frustrating view of the year so far given its vast unfulfilled potential.  

Season two starts where season one left off. Mo, a Palestinian refugee in Houston, Texas, with a 22-year-old pending asylum case and no passport, finds himself stranded in Mexico when he clumsily goes after the bandits who stole his mother’s olive trees. 

Unable to return to Texas, Mo carves out a temporary new life for himself in Mexico, selling falafel tacos from a food truck in Mexico City and competing in lucha libre wrestling matches in shady clubs. 

Just trying to be a good house guest pic.twitter.com/oZga3IZ9IM

— MO AMER (@realmoamer) February 9, 2025

With his family’s asylum hearing looming back in Houston, Mo tussles and fails to convince the unsympathetic officials at the US embassy to talk with the ambassador in order to obtain a laissez-passer. 

Mo catches a break when he finds out that one of his regular customers is in fact the wife of the ambassador. 

Clearly attracted to the Oso Palestino (The Palestinian Bear, Mo’s wrestling nickname), the ambassador’s wife invites him over to their opulent party where she makes an unwelcome and unreciprocated pass at him. 

The US ambassador initially proves sympathetic, promising to grant him the laissez-passer on time to make it to his court hearing. 

To his shock, the ambassador then asks him if he would like to become intimate with his wife in front of him to fulfil a long-standing fantasy. 

Things get a little queasy when a nervous Mo politely declines before the ambassador provokes his ire by calling the situation in Palestine a “conflict” instead of Mo’s preferred and more accurate description of “occupation”. 

This succinct but highly telling exchange is one of the highlights of the season; alas it’s never fully developed and is eventually rendered as a footnote in the drama.   

A heated verbal exchange ensues, prompting the ambassador to kick Mo out and deny him his last opportunity to return back home legally. 

Mo finally resorts to border smuggling only to be caught by a band of redneck migrant hunters upon crossing back to Texas. 

Shattering the American dream

In the most potent segment of the season, Mo is thrown into an asylum detention centre where he encounters an American guard utterly apathetic to his cause. 

A dingy, overcrowded structure with bad ventilation and no open spaces, the asylum center is a freakish creation lifted from the Saw films: a claustrophobic network of rooms populated by lost souls waiting for a salvation that never arrives. 

Finally confronting his officer, Mo asks him: “Why you gotta treat people like trash? Where’s your heart in all this?” 

“You've been here what, two to three days? I’m here every fuckin day,” the steely-eyed officer responds.

“At least you have a choice,” Mo hits back. 

Amer never dares to challenge the foundations of decadent capitalism in the US 

“No, what I have is a family. I’ve got two special needs kids; I’ve got a mother-in-law living in my fuckin house; I’ve got a leak I cannot pay for,” the officer says.

“The choice that I have is do I go home at night and blow my fucking brains out, or do I get up in the morning and come back here and deal with shit like you again and again and again? That’s the choice you’re talking about.” 

In those brief moments, Amer shatters the American dream, laying bare the grave inequality and disquiet in contemporary America, working-class America, which the Democrats neglected and that Republicans exploited for their political gain. 

Under this dysfunctional economic system, Amer emphasises, choice is nothing more than a luxury afforded by the privileged classes.  

Mo’s asylum case is rejected, but since he’s stateless and has no home country to return to, his deportation cannot be implemented. 

He therefore remains in an even bigger, more surreal limbo, shackled to a buzzing ankle monitor that keeps track of his whereabouts at all times. 

Food appropriation

The similarities Amer draws between the Palestinian experience and the migrant predicament with regard to their shared suspended existence is easily the strongest aspect of the new season. 

The non-deported deportations, as Amer revealed in interviews, are quite common and not unique to Palestinians, another facet of the senseless immigration system. 

Alas, the rest of the season does not live up to the promise of the first two episodes and what follows thereafter is a hodgepodge of romance, buddy comedies, and family dramas, coloured by Mo’s eternally beleaguered Palestinian identity and his longing for a closure over his father’s premature death. 

On his return home, Mo discovers that his long-suffering Mexican girlfriend, Maria (Teresa Ruiz) is now dating a dashing Israeli chef, Guy (Simon Rex), who runs one of the hottest eateries in town and sells Palestinian dishes as Israeli. 

Mo’s one-dimensional arch-nemesis becomes an easy target for Amer’s easy and overly-familiar stab at food appropriation, which never goes beyond rage at the blatant theft of Palestinian culture. 

Why the kleptomaniac Guy, who ends up stealing Mo’s falafel tacos idea, resorts to these tactics is never explained, denying both the character and the issue of food appropriation complexity. 

The sheer villainy of Guy uncovers an imperative question Amer bafflingly bypasses: what makes men like this Israeli chef who they are? Is it racism, sense of entitlement, or malevolent apathy? 

Amer’s negligence flattens the drama and, in the process, distorts his otherwise important and urgent treatise. 

Family drama adds little to nothing to the proceedings apart from an emotionality that often comes off as uncalibrated. 

The reveal that Mo’s brother Sameer (Omar Elba) is autistic only serves a different subplot at the end of the season related to a recurrent dream the former has.

Lacking intellectual rigour

Mo season two’s biggest shortcoming, however, is Amer’s erratic position towards the American dream. 

Time and time again, Mo uses his wits and charm to realise his family’s nascent olive oil business. 

Amer allows you to feel the pain of his alter ego’s failings, but he also pulls enough strings to compel his viewers into relishing Mo’s modest triumphs. 

In Mo’s Texas, financial success is still achievable as long as you have enough intelligence, goodwill, and determination, a position that contrasts with his depiction of the asylum centre officer.  

Amer never dares to challenge the foundations of decadent capitalism in the US. 

There’s nothing insightful or remotely new in Amer’s brief panorama of Palestinian life under the occupation

The comedian is scattershot in his criticism of his adopted home country; he certainly has problems with its immigration system, but he never touches the hyper capitalism that defines the country.

The Thanksgiving lunch scene in the penultimate episode of the season epitomises the sentiment. 

A gathering of Palestinians, Arabs, Blacks, whites and Hispanics debate the merits and ills of the US. 

Mo’s buddy Hameed (a still hilarious Moayad Alnefaie) defends his love of America, reminding the assembly that the country has ultimately provided Mo’s family with their coveted asylum. 

“Only after they gave the IDF 200 billion dollars,” Mo’s older sister, Nadia (Cherien Dabis), hits back.  

“Can we just agree that America sometimes is great and sometimes is just awful?” Maria says in a reconciliatory closing note that frankly rings hollow. 

A swift comparison to Brady Corbet’s Oscar contender The Brutalist, a film with a resolute, uncompromising vision of America, reveals what Mo lacks in that respect: an intellectual rigour.  

The show’s stance on Palestine is more pointed and cohesive, but is certainly not revolutionary or particularly perceptive. Upon marrying Maria, Mo at last becomes a legal resident and is able to visit his family for the first time in the occupied West Bank. 

Amer hits the checklist of the recognisable Palestinian quandaries in the occupied territories: aggressive inspections by Israeli security at the Tel Aviv airport; the pain of checkpoints; the brutality of the settlers. 

There’s nothing insightful or remotely new in Amer’s brief panorama of Palestinian life under the occupation. 

An encounter with his father’s old friends and an unseen home-video uncovers the ingenuity and dignity of a former electric engineer turned owner of a 99c store in Houston. But it wasn’t America, or even his forced displacement, that killed him: it’s the fact that he was “too proud” - as his mother puts it - to accept his new humble status. 

Was Mo’s father too weary to start over in America? Did he actually attempt to convert his degree and work in his field? Or was the American system not accommodating or accepting of his knowledge and talent? We never know. 

These unanswered questions conflate Amer’s ambiguous relationship with the US. 

His mother’s claim that their worth “come from Allah” does not clarify the issue.

The big takeaway at the end of the series is the mother’s emphasis that “The world will always try to tear us down. And when they do, we smile, because we know who we are.” 

Silent, dignified self-affirmation has always been and will continue to be a cornerstone in Palestinian resistance. 

In the wake of the Gaza genocide and Trump’s looming proposals for the complete erasure of Palestine, this suggested idle smiling, as internally empowering as it can be, is not the peaceful call to arms one was hoping and expecting Amer to heed.  

Mo concludes on 6 October 2023. Amer has announced that the show is not scheduled to come back for a third season, and it’s difficult to see how Netflix can sanction a new narrative set in the aftermath of 7 October. 

Mo 2 is a Disneyfied version of the Palestinian cause: a confused, watered-down domestic comedy that wants to have its cake and eat it; an irrefutable emotional saga with a lot of heart that nevertheless feels ill-fitting in the morally and politically charged post-7 October world.

The importance of Mo in maintaining the Palestinian narrative at the forefront of popular American culture is unquestionable; yet for anyone absorbed or engaged with Palestine outside the US, it offers little but rehashed ideas in a reductive form.