Me Gusta: October 7th, 2022
Me Gusta: October 7th, 2022
Ramy is a true believer stuck in the belly of whale
TV is kinda busy again! Arguably, it always is—but I ignore most things, so it’s rare for me to juggle multiple shows, as I am currently doing. My mainstays at the moment are The Nanny (still not ready to talk about it) and the hundredth rewatch of Mad Men, but I’ve also been checking out current stuff. Some of it is charming (Abbot Elementary’s second season), some of it is intriguing (The Patient), and some of it I’m just about ready to cut from the lineup because I can’t take the disappointment week after week (I’ll never tell which ones—at least in here).
And then to add to the chaos, Hulu dropped the third season of Ramy this weekend (I can’t figure out the rules for Hulu shows—I thought they were doing weekly releases? Or is that just for “FX on Hulu,” which we’re being asked to believe is a real thing?) I briefly mentioned this show in a past edition, where I called it “one of the best shows in television,” so I of course was going to check the new season out, but I had planned to do so slowly, spacing out episodes over a couple of weeks. And yet… I was supposed to go out on Saturday, then my plans got canceled due to force majeure, so I stayed in and gorged on some Popeyes and the whole season—an experience I do not recommend for its effects on body and spirit, but can’t quite condemn either.
If you are not familiar with the show (and I’ll try to keep it light with spoilers), it’s one of those modern sitcoms that stars the person who created it on a lightly fictionalized version of their lives. In Ramy’s case, it stars Ramy Youssef as a first-gen Egyptian-American living in Jersey. The fictional Ramy is not a writer/performer like his real-life counterpart, but he is someone who goes from job to job pretty aimlessly—and from woman to woman with the same lack of commitment. As much as Ramy drew from language established by the likes of Lena Dunham, Issa Rae, or Donald Glover (chiefly, making self-obsession relatable), the show has also contributed new things to the genre, particularly in its commitment to going beyond American borders. It’s one of the few mainstream shows I can think of that has substantial portions spoken in other languages (Arabic, French, Hebrew), and it even follows Ramy to Egypt and later to Israel and Palestine, instead of keeping his cultural identity in the background, as an oddity that adds flavor.
I always wonder how much representation contributes to people liking things. I am a firm believer in quality (which in my book is defined by talent + emotional honesty) as the main thing to consider in a work of art, and as I’ve said previously, “I could give two shits about seeing myself” on something. But I can’t help but wonder how much of my saying Ramy is one of the best shows on television had to do with me feeling like I was seeing myself on screen? Granted, Ramy and I have very different backgrounds, and yet a lot of the situations portrayed in the show felt very familiar. The way his household feels like a whole country, separate from what’s outside the front door. The way he is treated for speaking another language or having different customs, even by people who mean well. The way he feels alienated both by America and Egypt, not belonging to either fully, and how he also can fall into the trap of fetishizing “the homeland” as some sort of spiritual paradise—when all his cousin in Cairo wants to do is watch the latest Hobbes and Shaw after dinner at Chili’s. More than anything else, though, Ramy is one of the few shows I have seen, if not the only one, that centers a character that believes in God. “Like, God God. Not yoga,” as Ramy puts it.
I was taught in school that the “sit” in “sitcom” refers to the situation that creates the main conflict of the show—in The Nanny, for example, it’s the contrast between Fran’s Queens upbringing and the very posh family she works for; in Abbot Elementary, it’s Janine’s boundless optimism in a school system that constantly shuts her down. In Ramy, it’s the fact that this young man tries to be a good Muslim in a society that is in no way built around those values—and in that tension, I see myself reflected as few other shows can.
Now, to restate: I’m Catholic, not Muslim. Despite sharing the same root, the two religions have little in common, and neither is particularly friendly towards the other (but then again what religion is?) Yet I feel a kinship with Ramy, mostly because he sucks at being a good Muslim in similar ways that I suck at being a good Catholic. In particular, the show focuses a lot on his sex life (or sometimes lack thereof); Youssef himself acknowledged this in an interview:
“I personally am surprised by how sexually charged [the show is]… I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, huh.’ It’s not like that was the plan. That’s what came out.”
The first and second seasons explore Ramy’s quest to try and find love while dealing with what seems to me to be a burgeoning sex addiction, ruining relationship after relationship with his tortured approach to intimacy. Throughout, he tries to stay connected to God, throwing himself into more rigorous Ramadan fasting than anyone he knows, going back to Egypt for what he hopes will be a religious awakening, or following the instructions of a sheikh whom he believes can reform him (the sheikh, it should be said, is Mahershala Ali—whose instructions any of us, regardless of religion, would probably follow). And yet, season two culminates in a very painful catastrophe that we could see coming and yet hoped would not come to pass.
The third season, in turn, gives us a Ramy who’s basically over the whole thing. Something is broken inside; he doesn’t pray, he can’t answer whether he believes in God, and he’s not particularly connected with his family, friends, or women—he gets his sexual fix by visiting a massage parlor. All he cares about is making money, and he has no qualms working with people he’d otherwise avoid, or cannibalizing his cultural heritage, if it means bigger profits. And yet… there’s something in there. In small actions, like when he asks after a kid who was detained by Israeli police after stealing his passport, we can see the Ramy who cares is still alive, even if it has almost faded.
Watching this season made me think of the work of Graham Green, a fellow horny Catholic who famously wrote a thinly veiled novel about the affair he had with a married woman who ended up leaving him because she became a better Catholic than him (something that sounds very Ramy-like, if you’ve watched the show). It was not, however, that book that Ramy made me think of, but rather one of my favorite novels, The Power And The Glory, which tells the story of a clandestine priest in Tabasco at a time when Catholicism was outlawed in Mexico. The book was quite controversial when it was published: the priest travels around the state to tend to his Catholic flock at the risk of being caught and shot, but he isn’t a hero—besides having been a pompous asshole back in his prime, he (spoiler alert) had an affair with a woman with whom he fathered a child, a sin for which he hasn’t had the opportunity to confess after the revolution (there are no other priests with whom to do so), which means he’s out there administering sacraments while in mortal sin.
I love the book because, while it has its flaws (it can be a bit cerebral and—suprise!—kinda racist at points), it makes a case for how sanctity can grow from the most imperfect of circumstances, and how the challenges of this life don’t stand against, but rather support, spiritual growth. The priest spends a lot of the novel resisting this idea, agreeing to the point of desperation with those who tell him it’s time to call it quits and wondering why he hasn’t yet, drowning his self-pity with alcohol and putting everyone he comes into contact with in danger, before finally surrendering to his inevitable fate. “Sounds like a bummer!” you say, but no—like Ramy with its humor, the book uses life-and-death stakes to make the story grippingly entertaining where it could’ve been depressing.
“Okay, maybe not a bummer, but it sounds twisted.” Mom? Is that you? Jk yes, it’s kinda twisted. But it’s twisted in a good way, asking the tough questions and hanging around for the answers, like when Fleabag dated a priest for a whole season (the ultimate love triangle, it seems, is the one in which you compete with God). And the sort of twisted that ends gently. Because that’s what God is in all these stories—gentle. “Gentle? Some of the stuff you talked about sounds pretty painful!” I mean, yes. Some of it is painful, emotionally and/or physically. But it’s still gentle? To explain, I will refer to the story of Jonah.
In the Old Testament, Jonah was a guy whom God told to go preach to the city of Nineveh, a New York of sorts where people engaged in all kinds of depravity. God was fed up with the place and decided to smite them all, and He wanted Jonah to deliver the news. Jonah was not thrilled about this new role he was offered, so he decided to disregard God’s will and instead boarded a ship going in the opposite direction, but then the Lord caused a huge storm and the ship almost sank. Jonah, knowing this was all because of him, told the sailors to throw him overboard, and to their credit they initially resisted and did their best to get back to land, but it was pointless. Eventually they were like “oh well we tried” and threw Jonah overboard.
Knowing Old Testament Yaweh, you’d be forgiven for expecting Jonah to drown and spend an eternity in Hell for not doing as he was told, but instead, he was swallowed by a whale, Pinnochio-style. While it was probably really gross in there, it was better than death, so Jonah turned back to the Lord and praised Him for saving him, deciding to follow God’s will from then on—at which point (three days later) he was vomited by the whale onto the beach, from where he proceeded to Nineveh. After Jonah preaches for them to repent, they actually do, and God forgives them—and again Jonah is not thrilled by this, questioning God’s judgment and saying this is the reason he fled in the first place, because he knew God to be “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” This was a con in Jonah’s book: he did not wanna be the boy who cried apocalypse.
This time, God doesn’t send another whale, but rather a tree, which grows and provides Jonah with shade but then withers and dies, leaving Jonah to fry under the sun. Jonah gets even angrier, complaining that he’s so upset he could literally die, to which God replies:
“You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
Which, super fair! At the end of the day, regardless of how violent some parts of it sounded, God’s plan was a gentle one: he needed Jonah to go warn some people that they needed to shape up or die, and they got the message and were saved. Hooray! But Jonah couldn’t see or agree with any of this, and God was patient with him, leading him through Inception-like scenarios that allowed him to destroy whatever barriers were blocking him from doing the right thing.
And thus with the priest from The Power and The Glory, who is finally able to let go of his pride and self-pity by getting tired of running away—and thus with Ramy, who after spending most of season three in the belly of the whale, so to speak, eventually gets knocked down long enough to confront the things he’s been keeping bottled up. In a scene that brought tears to my eyes, he complains: “I was so afraid of God, I never loved God.” I high-key relate. I’ve spent so much of my life judging myself and being afraid of doing the wrong thing, that I don’t often feel the love I’ve been promised. Being a true believer can be exhausting, especially if you’re a perfectionist; like Ramy, I find myself kicking and screaming, saying “I gave it my best shot and still nothing, fuck this shit,” becoming apathetic and disconnected from the world around me.
And yet, in losing something he thought he thought he cared about, Ramy finally accepts that the choice was made for him, and it was a good one, and he stops resisting and gets vomited onto a beach (literally) so that he may once again find his way. As the finale’s credits rolled by, I caught myself feeling oddly at peace, believing in a gentle, patient God who’s always waiting for me to stop resisting.
Does that make Ramy the best show on television? I don’t know! It’s far from perfect, mostly by being unable to afford the rest of the characters the freedom it affords its protagonist, keeping them boxed in their circumstances. And especially in its third season, it can be a bummer, sometimes a comedy in name only (or maybe this was me watching it all at once as opposed to spacing it out like I had intended).
But for a little bit, at least, Ramy was able to calm the storm in my brain—and that’s no small feat.
Shameless self-promotion
The amazing Meena Das, whose nonprofit Namaste Data is all about learning to use data in a more humane, values-driven way, interviewed me for her Data Uncollected newsletter, where we talked about being immigrants, the dangers of outsourcing decisions to algorithms, and how it all comes together in my play Machine Learning.