#1 Happy Family USA Keeps Swinging
Spoilers follow for the first season of #1 Happy Family USA, all eight episodes of which premiered on Prime Video on April 17.
If Ramy Youssef’s other TV shows, Ramy and Mo, were meant to evoke a friendly, self-deprecating Muslim man offering non-brown viewers a pull on the hookah, Youssef’s latest, #1 Happy Family USA, throws that glass pipe and its symbolic desire for cross-cultural friendship into a bonfire. In an era where the current administration is using the post-9/11 playbook of painting wide swaths of people with an undesirable brush and disappearing whomever they want, #1 Happy Family USA lands like the ravings of a prescient prophet and a belated jolt of righteous rage.
Youssef’s first animated series, co-created with South Park veteran Pam Brady and bearing much of the satirical tone and rapid-fire pacing of that show, follows the Husseins, a Muslim and Egyptian family living in New Jersey in 2001. Before September 11, they are varying levels of assimilated; after, they respond to the Islamophobic suspicion leveled at them in contrasting ways. The series’ name is a nod to their first attempt, in which they insist they are patriotic and proud Americans, to increasingly soul-deadening results. A chaotic miasma of absurd situations, bawdy jokes, and tongue-in-cheek complaints about whether representation really matters, #1 Happy Family USA gets more critical of both its subjects and the country they live in with each installment until its resentments become an inferno scorching everything in its path, from the Husseins’ self-worth to America’s commitment to forever wars. And its cliffhanger ending, which portrays former president George W. Bush as a kidnapping sociopath gleefully air-dropping children into war zones, is the wackiest, wildest, angriest thing Youssef has ever attached his name to.
As #1 Happy Family USA begins on September 10, the Husseins’ multigenerational family dynamics aren’t too dissimilar from those in Ramy. Hussein Hussein (voiced by Youssef) runs a halal food cart outside the Fox News headquarters in New York City, while his wife, Sharia “Sharon” Hussein (voiced by Salma Hindy), is a receptionist at a dentist’s office. Their two children are high-schooler Mona (Alia Shawkat), a star student planning to attend Harvard who is hiding her queerness from her parents, and middle-schooler Rumi (also voiced by Youssef), a dorky outsider so in love with his teacher Mrs. Malcolm (Mandy Moore) that he fantasizes about being the Vili Fualaau to her Mary Kay Letourneau. Also in the house are Sharon’s parents — her television-obsessed mother (voiced by Randa Jarrar), always in a full-body niqāb, and her misogynist, chain-smoking father (voiced by Azhar Usman). #1 Happy Family USA has an immediate clown-car quality as the family members tumble over one another for screen time and characterization, but by the end of the 9/11-depicting premiere, the series focuses its plot and its politics.
Once Hussein Hussein proclaims that the family should code-switch into more affable, Americanized versions of themselves when they leave the house (a transformation the series renders as different animations of the family members, like Mona’s hair straightened from its naturally frizzy curls), #1 Happy Family USA challenges how long their performance can last. Can they endure an FBI agent (voiced by Timothy Olyphant) moving in across the street? Or Sharon reverting to her birth name of Sharia? How about Mona manipulating her classmates’ stereotypes about repressed Muslim girls to become more popular? And what if Rumi, while trying to toe the line between fitting in with his classmates and making his family proud, realizes that, according to the president, at least, he’s more like Osama bin Laden than anyone else on this earth? In the world of #1 Happy Family USA, even a lonely, nerdy, desperate-for-affection kid like Rumi can be conflated with the world’s most-wanted terrorist.
#1 Happy Family USA feels particularly punchy because it throws blows at everyone it can, from the system that allows for ethical collapse to the individuals who engage in it: Muslims who sold out to the model-minority fable, American government officials who urged brown people to turn against one another, any person who abandons their moral compass for material gain. By using 9/11 as a jumping-off point to careen through a greatest-hits list of Muslim and MENA aggrievement from the early aughts, #1 Happy Family USA wryly reclaims pop culture’s Orientalist tactics for its own mocking aims. (The series’ refashioning of the ululating lament so typical of traditional Muslim music to deliver sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking commentary is better than anything Hans Zimmer did in the Dune scores.) Youssef and his creative team have created a furious show, but also an incredibly funny one with a number of fantastical touches and niche jokes that feel tailor-made for first-gen-immigrant audiences specifically and Muslim viewers tired of apologizing for themselves broadly. The Hussein family bickers about which MENA ethnicities are better than others. Rumi grimaces whenever his parents put him on the phone with their relatives back in Egypt, unsure of what to say, and is relieved by how quickly their phone card runs out of minutes. “Spies in the Mosque,” a song about the FBI’s secret wiretaps that is animated with eyes and arms zooming out of the mosque’s shoe cubbies, is somehow a banger. And Real Housewives wishes its Dubai iteration was as entertaining as #1 Happy Family USA’s spin on the franchise, with judgmental aunties shit-talking their rivals’ hijab styles.
Some of this treads similar ground to the season-one Ramy episode “Strawberries,” in which a teen version of Ramy struggled to make sense of 9/11 and had a surreal conversation with bin Laden; like so many millennial Muslim Americans, Youssef has long been trying to work through how that day changed his identity and the broader world. But nearly everything “Strawberries” did, #1 Happy Family USA pushes further tonally and thematically, ignoring boundaries of appropriateness — and even good taste — to try to understand the noxious, bizarre national tenor of the early aughts.
The season’s diatribe against the War on Terror ends goofily in the finale, “A Sleepover With Mr. President,” with Bush — whom Rumi has befriended over AOL Instant Messenger and who surprises the Husseins at their house — telling Rumi that he has the exact same internet download history as bin Laden, forcibly enlisting the teen into a government-approved children’s espionage program (named Spy Kids, of course), and dropping him out of a plane into Kabul to find the Al Qaeda leader. The series got a two-season order, so that cliffhanger will be resolved in the next set of episodes. But before that unlikely thriller conclusion, #1 Happy Family USA goes for heartbreak over scorn as Bush persuades the rest of the Hussein family to give up their campaign to free a relative from Guantanamo Bay for individual benefit. Hussein and Sharia agree to stop calling for Gitmo’s closure when Bush promises to erase their credit-card debt and drive more business to their halal cart; Mona is swayed by promises to get her into Harvard. For the right price, the Husseins lose their principles. And here, there’s another Ramy comparison to be made: Think of “Egyptian Cigarettes,” when Ramy ignored the injustices he experienced in Palestine to expand his jewelry business. But Rumi and his family aren’t outliers like Ramy was. They’re a distinctly American tragedy both because of what’s done to them and what they do to themselves.