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Television creators and scholars are pointing to a growing slate of U.S. shows made by Arab and Muslim Americans that aim to show people in everyday situations rather than as stock characters. An Associated Press report highlights programs such as Mo Amer’s Netflix dramedy “Mo,” Netflix’s dating-and-matchmaking series “Muslim Matchmaker,” and the animated “#1 Happy Family USA,” describing them as part of a shift toward more grounded storytelling about identity.
Amer, a Palestinian American comedian, writer and actor, has said that writing from lived experience helps a story feel authentic. In an interview highlighted by the report, Amer told The Associated Press, “Whenever you want to make a grounded show that feels very real and authentic to the story and their cultural background, you write to that,” and added that the approach helps viewers “see themselves very easily.”
The AP report says “Mo,” which documents Mo Najjar and his family’s “tumultuous journey” reaching the United States after Palestinian refugees seek asylum, received critical acclaim and that its first season won a Peabody. It also describes the second season’s opening as Najjar running a falafel taco stand in Mexico after he was locked in a van transporting stolen olive trees across the U.S.-Mexico border, while trying to retrieve the trees and return them to the farm where he and his mother and brother are working to build an olive oil business.
The report places “Mo” within a wider wave of television from Arab and Muslim American creators, saying these series are telling “nuanced, complicated stories about identity without falling into stereotypes” that Western media has historically portrayed. It also notes that “Mo” is not presented only as a private family story; the series addresses Israeli-Palestinian relations, the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and the reality of asylum seekers detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, even as the second season narrative ends before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel.
Other shows named in the AP report frame Muslim American life through different plot devices. “Muslim Matchmaker,” hosted by matchmakers Hoda Abrahim and Yasmin Elhady, connects Muslim Americans from around the country with the goal of finding a spouse. The animated series “#1 Happy Family USA,” created by Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady, follows an Egyptian American Muslim family navigating life in New Jersey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.
Researchers say the current wave responds to how Arab and Muslim characters have often been handled in earlier eras of American entertainment. Sahar Mohamed Khamis, a University of Maryland professor who studies Arab and Muslim representation in media, told the AP that the key is understanding the “historical, political, cultural and social contexts” in which the content is created. She said that after the 9/11 attacks, Arabs and Muslims became the villains in many American films and TV shows, and she described how the ethnic background of Arabs and the religion of Islam were often portrayed as synonymous.
Khamis also said in the report that the media villain was often “a man with brown skin with an Arab-sounding name.” In her discussion of earlier portrayals, she described Western depictions before 9/11 in which people from the Middle East were presented to audiences as exotic figures living in desert tents and riding camels, while she said women were often depicted as lacking agency and “confined to the harem.” The report ties that framing to “orientalism,” a term Palestinian American academic and political activist Edward Said coined in a 1978 book.
The article also included commentary from Elhady, who said the series format matters because it can flip the usual pattern of representation. Elhady told the AP that “it’s really important to have shows that show us as everyday Americans,” while also showing people living “in different places” and negotiating “dual realities.” She described this as having “a foot in the East and a foot in the West and the reality of really negotiating that context,” in the way the series portrays characters.
While the report describes these projects as wins, it also emphasizes the limits of representation in the industry’s power structures. Sanaz Alesafar, executive director of Storyline Partners, said she has seen successes in Hollywood and cited “Mo,” “Muslim Matchmaker,” and “#1 Happy Family USA.” But Alesafar argued there remains a need for stories “written and produced by people from those backgrounds,” saying decision-making and centers of power still push creators toward recurring tropes.
“I n the popular imagination and popular culture, we’re still siloed in really harmful ways,” Alesafar said in the report. She added: “Yes, we’re having these wins and these are incredible, but that decision-making and centers of power still are relegating us to these tropes and these stereotypes.”
Deana Nassar, an Egyptian American who is head of creative talent at film production company Alamiya Filmed Entertainment, said representation matters to her family, telling the AP that it helps her children see themselves “for their own self image.” Nassar also said she wants more diverse people in decision-making roles, adding that without that shift, representation will not go far enough, which she described as a sign that Hollywood is not “going to get us all the way there.”
The report also points to research that connects portrayal with public policy preferences. It says a recent study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that participants who witnessed positive representation of Muslims were less likely to support anti-democratic and anti-Muslim policies than those who viewed negative representations.
For Amer, the AP report says, the remaining bottleneck comes less from creators than from the industry gatekeepers who decide which projects get greenlit. He said the success of “Mo” and similar shows is “a start,” but he wants more industry recognition for his work and for other creators aiming to make similar stories. “That’s the thing, like just keep writing, that’s all it’s about,” Amer told the AP, saying he is excited about “the next things” because he has “a really deep well” to keep creating.