Ramy Youssef Wants to "Complicate the Conversation" with His New Hulu Series

What kind of Muslim is Ramy Hassan? That seems to be one of the central questions of Ramy Youssef’s self-titled Hulu series Ramy, available to stream starting April 19. The show opens on Ramy’s character going to Friday prayer at the mosque, and a few scenes later, we see him in a bathroom hushedly filling up his used condom with water to make sure it didn’t break during sex. (“There’s Friday prayer, and then there’s Friday night,” Ramy says in episode 10). In that vein, the series confronts the audience with discussions and situations that describe what a lot of Muslims experience, but that rarely make it into conversations or in popular culture. Some of those are as surface level as sex and dating, and others more uncomfortable, like bigotry amongst Muslims and carrying emotional baggage from 9/11. Each episode centers a different topic in Ramy’s life, and that includes the good, the bad, and the hard-to-explain.

A24 and Hulu first dropped the trailer for the show in early March, and since then it has racked up 5.5 million views on YouTube and a lot of attention from Muslims of the internet. The online reactions are the perfect storm of excited, nervous, and immediately critical. But Ramy says he doesn’t feel the pressure to represent all Muslims, at least not in his first season, because he doesn’t think he can do it right.

“I actually tried to be limited in its point of view. I didn’t want to talk about things or get into things that aren’t mine to touch,” he tells Teen Vogue. “Especially for a first season, where we were finding our voice, I wanted to write about the things that I know. That, by definition, is very limiting. And I think that’s okay.”

It’s easy to watch a few episodes and feel like you’ve gotten to know Ramy Youssef personally. Much of the show feels very autobiographical — it takes place in North Jersey, the cast includes one of Ramy’s childhood friends, and the Ramy character in the show sounds a lot like the performer does in real life. As is the case for a lot of comedians who go from stand-up to screenwriting, there’s a reason for that.

“All of the show is based off a stand-up premise of mine. In the pilot especially — every scene is based on my stand-up, even down to the foot-washing,” he says. “That’s all been a really cool pipeline into making the show.” And though Ramy the character is not perfectly autobiographical of Ramy’s IRL self, he insists that all of it still feels “emotionally true” and authentic. “These are all feelings that I’ve felt. The actions that come after those feelings are sometimes different in real life.”

Of the ten episodes, there are two where Ramy’s character hardly shows up. The creator allocated one episode to the mother and sister characters respectively, wherein the lens adopts their points of view. The episodes depict his sister Dena’s relationship to sexism and his mother’s relationship to loneliness “because to me, representation isn’t giving them three lines every episode,” he says. “It’s giving them a moment where the camera can linger on them. That’s really when you feel for a character — when they’re allowed to be on screen saying nothing. That’s actually looking at someone’s point of view, and to be able to carve that out was really important.”

It’s in these episodes that we see the complexity and humanity of the two Arab Muslim women characters and the frustrations they face internally, among their families, and outside their homes. It’s not often that we see Muslim characters, let alone Muslim woman characters, so it’s quite remarkable that Ramy created an opportunity for the audience to empathize with those internal struggles.

Additionally, the show very pointedly includes imperfect characters: from microaggressions by almost everyone in the family to his blatantly anti-Semitic misogynistic uncle. According to Ramy, he included them because they’re real even if he knows that they will make people uncomfortable. There isn’t anything that he included that was dramatized for television. And with someone like the uncle character, one that might be unsettling to watch for some.

“The whole point of the show to me is to complicate the conversation,” Ramy says. “There’s this thought that a character should get his karma at the end of that episode. But I think what’s exciting about TV is that, again, hopefully, we get to do a couple of seasons, you’re planting seeds, and things get to grow. That guy doesn’t get his karma, doesn’t get his resolution the next day. It’s just not how it works.”

Ramy punctuates the season with a two-episode-long trip to Cairo, in hopes of gaining clarity about where he comes from and being surrounded by people with whom he expects to share commonalities. The Egypt episodes may as well have been a two-panel “expectations vs.reality” shot, with one side featuring a meditative, grounding experience and the other a country full of people who are unable to be the therapy he seeks because, especially as they recover from a devastating revolution, they’re just as lost and flawed as he is.

“As children of immigrants here, we in some ways can have some magical expectations of the place that we come from and want it to have all these answers and things, and it’s just a place where people are just kind of struggling to figure out how to live in the same way we are here,” Ramy says. “[My character] is kind of met with the realities of his idyllic expectations of that place. I think the most interesting thing about those episodes is just seeing him interact with the people of his generation [in Cairo], who have been through a revolution, and he hasn’t, and so while there are a lot of similarities between them, there are so many things that he can’t even grasp.”

The series does a lot of work to illustrate the often flawed and uncomfortable reality of what certain Muslim communities, both in America and abroad, really look like, and in ten 22-minute episodes, the show did an impressive amount of it. Ramy Youssef doesn’t shy away from showing uncomfortable truths such as bigoted family members or sexism within the Muslim community. And he won’t rush to resolve that discomfort.

“That’s not real. It should feel unresolved,” he says. “I think that’s great. That is what life is — it’s just a bunch of unresolved stuff that we’re trying to figure out how to fix. It’s not about providing answers, it’s about asking the right questions.”

Related: The Essential Black Muslim Reading List