Mo Amer and Ramy Youssef on How ‘Mo’ Grapples With Palestine and Israel in Season 2 — Without Mentioning Oct. 7

“I’m finding it very, very hard to function,” says Mo Amer.

He’s spending the day at Hermann Park in Houston, the city where he’s lived since he was 9 years old. It’s late March and the air is still cool. Young parents guide their toddlers over twisted tree roots. Ducks quack in the distance. Amer, 43, is surrounded by a small but focused TV crew who are here to help him pull off his dream: showrunning and starring in the first Palestinian-led series in American history. But lately, world events have made it harder than ever to publicly celebrate his heritage.

Season 1 of “Mo,” which premiered on Netflix in August 2022, told a fictionalized version of Amer’s experience as a formerly undocumented refugee seeking asylum status in the U.S. Amer had toured as a stand-up comic for years, but the series cemented his place in the entertainment industry: After DJ Khaled and the supermodel sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid, he’s the most famous Palestinian in town. He’s been riding that high for a couple of years now: Also in 2022, he co-starred in DC’s Dwayne Johnson-led film “Black Adam” as Karim, a character from the fictional Middle Eastern country of Kahndaq; later this year, he’ll set off on a national comedy tour produced by Live Nation and titled “El Oso Palestino.” With each new peak in his career, he has put his culture in the spotlight, beginning to remedy decades of under- and misrepresentation of Arabs in Hollywood. And even though Netflix renewed “Mo” while also announcing that the comedy series’ second season — which premieres on Jan. 30 — would be its last, Amer exudes confidence that he’ll get to make more of it: “The season that I’ve put together, I know, is exceptional. Let the chips fall where they may.”

While that decision may be above his head, Amer isn’t wrong to hype himself up. “Mo” is unlike anything on TV — with characters spouting off thoughtful, dark humor in rapid-fire English, Spanish and Arabic and hand-feeding each other bites of Middle Eastern food with love, all encased within gorgeous shots of a city where scripted television rarely goes. The impact is apparent: “Mo” earned unanimous rave reviews and a Peabody Award without the help of an A-list cast or a massive budget.

The success was easier to enjoy the first time around though. The writers’ room for Season 2 opened on Oct. 1, 2023, just days after the conclusion of the writers strike. By the end of that week, the world had changed. Amer hasn’t been able to think of anything else since.

“My family is living under occupation, where you can’t move freely at all,” he says. Since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in its Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Israel’s retaliation campaign has killed 46,000 to 70,000 people or more in Gaza, according to various estimates. Additionally, Israeli settler violence and the presence of the Israeli military have dramatically increased in the West Bank, where Amer’s ancestry lies. “My aunts have needed to go to the doctor for the last year, and they haven’t gone,” he says. “It’s normally a seven-minute drive, but now it’s hours.”

Hopefully, Israel and Hamas’ ceasefire agreement, announced on Jan. 15, will begin to change that, but Amer is “very, very skeptical.” On one hand, he says, “A ceasefire is what’s most important — the protection of innocent men, women and children and the release of the hostages. The one thing we can be hopeful about is no more killing, and the idea of human life being sacred; I’m praying for peace and true freedom for all.” But there’s more work to be done.

“Like, what happens to those millions of people that in southern Gaza that are all smashed into one another and living in tents? What do you go home to?” Amer continues. And there’s just as much uncertainty regarding what his relatives are going through: “The situation in West Bank is completely separate. There’s no deal for the West Bank, so they’re still under apartheid law.”

When “Mo” premiered, Amer was proud that he’d introduced American viewers to a culture many of them knew little about. But after Oct. 7, suddenly he realized Season 2 would be released into a world filled with all kinds of new and often uninformed opinions about his people.

Hollywood is part of the problem. “You’ve seen it online. It was really disheartening to see [celebrities] so reactive, and not coming from a place of compassion,” he says. “It seems like a miserable existence. Like, this is your purpose in life? To just make angry, hateful videos? I mean, Palestinians are called animals. What the fuck is that?

“Everybody’s finger-pointing at each other, but I’m not doing any of that. Let’s sit, have a meal together. As much pain and suffering as I have in my heart, I’m willing to push that aside to have a meaningful conversation so we can move forward. That’s what I’m about.”

Abiding by that ethos, the “Mo” writers realized they didn’t want to write about the war at all. “We wanted to honor the seeds that we had laid in Season 1,” says Ramy Youssef, the Egyptian American comedian who co-created “Mo” and is best known for his self-titled Hulu series. “We had this feeling: ‘You know, it could go up to Oct. 6 …’”

Season 1 closed with a cliffhanger that saw Mo mistakenly transported to Mexico in the back of a truck driven by thieves, leaving him stranded and without travel documents. The second season picks up six months later, in September 2022, and ends the day before the Hamas attacks.

Still, the writers discussed the war at length, a process Amer found “enlightening. It helped me cope in a way that I don’t know if I would have otherwise.” He says he has the diversity of his staff to thank for that.

Among those voices is writer and executive producer Harris Danow. “I’m Jewish, and I grew up in a very pro-Israel family that held some, let’s just say, pretty racist views on the whole thing,” Danow says. “Over the course of years, I transformed pretty radically.” When Danow joined the Season 1 writers’ room, he was upfront with Amer about having been “fed a narrative” when he was younger that Palestinians were “just terrorists,” but he hoped his background might be an asset to the series. “And to his credit,” Danow says, “Mo embraced that.”

“Mo” was never meant to be a ripped-from-the-headlines show. “The Israel-Palestine of it all is something we intentionally avoided in Season 1,” Danow says. “Not because of the politics, but because the only thing people really know about Palestinians from the outside is their relationship to Israel and the occupation.” The focus of “Mo,” instead, was on humanizing them.

Having achieved that, the writers were more interested in talking about Israel in Season 2. But the aftermath of Oct. 7 found them wading into different waters than they planned.

After brainstorming “every single iteration you could ever imagine” of a war-related storyline, Amer got a sour taste in his mouth: “That rabbit hole became very didactic.” A show that once was full of jokes between friends and squabbles between lovers was devolving into a string of unruly political arguments that didn’t advance the plot. “The room had this feeling of ‘Oh, my God, there’s so much to talk about, and we gotta talk about all of it,’” Youssef says. “Then it became like, ‘Yeah, but what do these characters need?’”

“So I pulled the plug on it. You can write something that becomes just for a moment in time, or you can write something that’s timeless,” Amer says — but he’s managed to achieve both. Post-Oct. 7, the writers were able to assume viewers would understand brief Middle Eastern references that wouldn’t have previously been topical in the U.S. New ideas sprang forth. Mo winds up in a love triangle with his ex-girlfriend (Teresa Ruiz) and her new boyfriend (Simon Rex), who’s an Israeli chef; later, when Mo insults the boyfriend’s hummus, a stranger thinks he’s talking about Hamas. The result is a season that feels aware of the war without mentioning it, answering a question Youssef kept in mind throughout the writing process: “What can a scripted comedy do that nothing else can do?”

The show creators also thought avoiding the war would help them honor the region’s past more completely. The events that have followed Oct. 7 are “only one of many, many markers” of loss for Palestinians, Youssef points out. So while you won’t hear any “Mo” characters utter that date, since they haven’t experienced it yet, they do regularly bring up years like 1948 and 1967, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Favoring the present over the past would have done “a massive disservice to the historical context,” Amer says. “The Palestine-Israel situation is not something that started on Oct. 7. This has been going on for a while.”

Amer also worried that responding to real-world news too specifically might make the show feel dated, because he couldn’t know how the war would progress between writing the season and its release: “What if you make a mistake? You start doing something, and then the whole thing changes, and then it becomes irrelevant. It becomes yesterday’s news.” The ceasefire has proven his point.

“Mo” finds its own way to comment on the current political climate. In one scene, Mo’s mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), can’t tear her eyes from her phone, obsessing over a news story about a Palestinian school destroyed by Israel instead of enjoying Thanksgiving with her family. Mo’s sister, Nadia (Cherien Dabis), argues that they owe it to the Palestinian struggle to try to lead joyful lives. “You see what’s going on in their hearts and minds and spirits, and that, to me, tells you everything you need to know,” Amer says.

Since early in the development of “Mo,” Amer had wanted to shoot in Burin, the village his family comes from. So when Netflix only gave him one more season, he knew he needed to get there soon.

Or rather, that his characters needed to. Mo’s inability to travel with his family to Palestine is a central tension of Season 2, and while that’s due to the character’s immigration status, for safety reasons, even American citizens like Amer can’t travel there now. The finale was shot in May 2024, seven months into the war, and it was impossible to move production to the West Bank as he had dreamed of doing.

But all hope wasn’t lost. Somehow — with “a lot of creativity,” Amer says with a laugh, still nervous thinking about the logistics — he was able to hire a local camera crew to capture exterior shots in Burin, Bethlehem and other West Bank towns as he supervised remotely.

“I obviously told them, ‘If you feel a twinge of uncertainty, please turn around and don’t do it.’ But they were resilient,” he says. While the interiors for scenes set in Palestine were shot in Malta, most of the landscapes are the real deal.

“Showcasing the village we come from and my grandparents’ home is something to never forget,” Amer says, adding, “Thankfully, it’s immortalized forever” — leaving unsaid his fear that the house could be destroyed or taken away.

“I can’t believe this is the last season,” Amer says. By that, he means that he doesn’t believe it. Without being explicitly critical, Amer makes it clear that he disagrees with Netflix’s decision to end “Mo.” He bristles at the streamer’s “second and final” phrasing about the new season. “There’s so much to give, so it’s kind of ridiculous to only fit it into two seasons. All the love that we got the first season — let’s see what that turns into,” he says. “There’s an immense amount of story to cover for many seasons.”

(Netflix has given no indication that it’s open to reversing the show’s fate, still referring to the new season as “final” in all recent communication.)

Maybe it’s the scrappy, determined nature of his on-screen alter ego, who’s been mercilessly tossed around the globe by the powers that be for his entire life and always finds a way back home. Or maybe it’s just the guffaw Amer lets slip at the implication that his show is ending anytime soon. “If there is a Season 3, maybe we go there then,” he says about potential Oct. 7 storylines. “There’s plenty of meat on this bone.”

Whatever it is, Amer’s suave, self-assured attitude is integral to what makes “Mo” — the story of a Palestinian refugee constantly scraping himself out of a new tragedy — still feel like a comedy.

The recipe is simple. When Amer decides that something is true — on-screen, that he’ll one day return to Palestine, and in real life, that there’s more “Mo” to come — you believe him.