Mo artfully tackles the migrant crisis in its fantastic final season

Netflix’s timely, heartfelt dramedy goes global.

By Laura Zornosa | January 30, 2025 | 5:00am

Photo: Netflix

TV Reviews Mo

Mo artfully tackles the migrant crisis in its fantastic final season

Mo is stuck in Mexico. In 2022, the first season of Mo—the eponymous dramedy loosely based on comedian Mohammed “Mo” Amer’s life—ended with Mo (Mohammed Najjar, played by Amer) accidentally chasing olive-tree thieves all the way across the border from Houston. But Mo doesn’t have a passport. He’s a Palestinian refugee, and he has no way home.

That’s where we find him at the beginning of season two, six months after the events of the first batch’s finale, languishing in limbo. But Mo has an asylum hearing coming up in Houston—one he’s been waiting 22 years for—and he needs to get back fast. So he turns to smugglers, coyotes. And, through the show’s wry wit, we get a clear-eyed view of the migrant crisis.

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Mo (both the character and the real-life comedian) is already an asylum seeker; he was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, and they fled to the U.S. during the first Gulf War. Now the character’s sticky immigration situation is compounded. Who better, perhaps, to peel back the film on the realities of a squalid detention center? Who understands being forced to flee the only home one has ever known better than a Palestinian?

If the twin crises of the overloaded immigration system and the constant conflict in Palestine will shape 2025, then Mo’s second season might help us meet the moment—or at least understand it. “Well, it’s not really a conflict, right?” Mo asks a U.S. ambassador to Mexico. “A conflict implies there’s two equal sides.”

Mo is, of course, caught while crossing the border. (He’s a regular Charlie Brown of the immigration system, with the proverbial football yanked away from him time and time again.) He gets sent, along with the others, to a Texas border immigration facility, a mouthful to describe a cramped metal warehouse. This is not, to clarify, an ICE facility. But it is dehumanizing to the extreme, full of dirty drinking water, antagonistic border agents, and godawful smells.

We see a snippet of what it took for the migrants to get here: “We waited three weeks for the ferry to take us close enough to the border to go by foot,” one man tells a group of listeners. “And then 10 day caminamos through the jungle with the mudslides, the snakes. But the worst was the cartel. Three days we hide from them, drinking only the juice from the can of a sausage, to make it last. Until finally we crossed into Panama.” “Fuck,” Mo says under his breath. “You did all that to get to Panama?” “Yes,” the man replies. “And you, what is your story?” “Oh,” Mo responds, sheepish. “I took a bus from Mexico City.”

And here lies the magic of Mo: Amer—and co-creator Ramy Youssef and writers Chris Gabo, Harris Danow, Azhar Usman, Anna Salinas, Jacqui Rivera, and Luis Sivoli—excel at the one-two punch of exposing a stark reality (one that’s important to witness) followed by masterful comic relief, delivered with suave embodiment by Amer. (It’s the polar opposite of Mo’s luchador alter ego, El Oso Palestino, who cannot land a punch to save his life.)

Amer’s distinct brand of comedy is hard to name, but it shines through here. He oscillates between sincere and silly, grounded in a sense of self-assuredness. He knows who he is. He knows where he comes from. And he knows who his people are, be they Mexican (Mo’s estranged girlfriend, Maria), Nigerian (Mo’s childhood best friend, Nick), or Saudi/Sudanese (Mo’s other pal, Hameed).

He also knows who his people aren’t: decidedly not Guy (Simon Rex), Maria’s new boyfriend. Mo and Maria (Teresa Ruiz) broke up—or at least had a blowout, relationship-altering fight—last season for a whole host of reasons, including a gunshot wound (long story) that he hid from her. Plus, he’s Muslim, she’s Catholic, and he was always worried that the older generation of his family wouldn’t accept her. (To be fair, they didn’t. But he still could’ve stood up for her.)

Enter Guy, who Mo gets along quite well with at first, before learning that he’s dating Maria—and, perhaps more importantly, that he’s Israeli. This becomes an arc of comic tension over the rest of the season, as Guy’s success (he’s the chef at a splashy new Israeli restaurant) acts as foil to Mo’s stasis (he sells falafel tacos out of a bike food cart).

That stagnation, as the show reminds us, is caused largely by the swamp of red tape in which Mo is mired. He can’t work without papers, but those papers are dangled far out of reach—especially after having illegally crossed the border into the U.S. Rather than granting asylum’s holy grail, a judge orders Mo’s deportation. This proves tricky, given that Mo is a stateless person. There’s no place to deport him to.

So—even though Mo is technically deported—he’s released on his own recognizance. They have to let him stay, and he can even have a work permit. He just has to wear an ankle monitor at all times. Plus, he can’t vote, and if he ever gets in trouble with the law, ICE can put him in a detention center indefinitely. It’s an absurd paradox, one that the show illuminates succinctly, without falling into didacticism.

Here again, Mo offers us a new vantage point into immigration. And these insights are couched within what is still predominantly a comedy. Yes, we’re learning, but we’re also laughing—and taking in dream sequences that are scattered throughout the season, flights of fancy that lift us briefly from the sometimes gritty subject matter. In those recurring dreams, Mo’s grandparents appear with a key, often at times of uncertainty when he could use a bit of guidance. And—spoiler alert—it turns out that key is to their old home in Haifa.

This is depicted in the last episode of what Netflix has said is the last season of Mo (although Amer hopes the show will live on). It’s a gorgeous, 40-minute ode to the West Bank, to Palestine, to olive trees and family and God, culture, heritage, and memory. Where we come from informs who we are each day and lives on in the back of our minds. But it’s important to remember that some of those places still exist and to treasure the ones that do and mourn the ones we’ve lost. The real challenge is to remind ourselves that, as Mo’s mom (Farah Bsieso) tells him: “Hamoodi, the world will always try to tear us down. And when they do, we smile. Because we know who we are.”

Mo season two premieres January 30 on Netflix