On “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in 2017, comedian Ramy Youssef introduced himself: “I’m Muslim. Like from the news. Have you guys seen our show?”
Well, you have and you haven’t. You’ve seen Muslims treated as threats and problems on “24” and “Homeland.” You’ve seen the current president use Islamophobia like a sweeps stunt to court the Fox News base, claiming that “Islam hates us” and launching a trolling campaign against a Muslim congresswoman.
Muslims have been continual objects of American TV, but rarely subjects. The occasional exceptions, like “Aliens in America” and “All-American Muslim” — a reality show about families in Dearborn, Michigan, that sponsors withdrew ads from — haven’t lasted long.
Youssef’s soulful, winning new comedy “Ramy,” whose first season arrives on Hulu on Friday, makes up for lost time fast.
The show’s strength is that, as the title suggests, it tells the story not of a vast group but of one person and the specific people around him. The title character (Youssef) still lives with his conservative parents — Palestinian immigrants by way of Egypt — and his adult sister, Dena (May Calamawy) in Northern New Jersey.
Ramy Hassan doesn’t just “happen to be” Muslim. He practices his faith earnestly, albeit selectively. He doesn’t drink, but he does have a lot of premarital sex. He goes to mosque, but, in the opening episode, a fellow worshipper scolds him for rushing his ritual ablution and not washing between his toes.
Ramy’s spiritual drift is bound up with his young-adult search for identity. Where does he belong? Is he a good person? Can he commit to anything? It echoes in his professional life (he jumped off the med school track and is working for a sketchy tech company) and his love life. (He’s dated mainly non-Muslims, and the show sharply interrogates his double standard about Muslim women who enjoy sex.)
Youssef’s chill, thoughtful manner suggests a more bright-eyed version of Donald Glover’s Earn from “Atlanta,” with which “Ramy” shares a slice-of-life perspective and a sense of humor that relies on interactions more than gags.
Much of the comedy comes from Ramy’s sounding boards: Steve (Steve Way), who has muscular dystrophy and a caustic attitude, and his Muslim friends Mo (Mohammed Amer) and Ahmed (Dave Merheje), who have a more comfortable and casual relationship to their faith. They urge him to let his parents set him up with a Muslim woman but mock his newfound passion for the Ramadan fast — it’s as if, Mo says, Ramy wants to “all of a sudden turn into Malcolm X.”
Merely taking religion in the modern world seriously makes “Ramy” an outlier, even in a you-can-say-anything-on-TV era. In HBO’s “Crashing,” Pete Holmes grappled with Christianity in the secular world of comedy, but it was just canceled after three seasons. Bridget Bedard, the showrunner of “Ramy,” came from “Transparent,” the most thoroughly Jewish show on TV, but that too is a rarity.
“Ramy” quickly becomes a rich, specific 21st-century American story. The fourth episode, a stunner, flashes back to 12-year-old Ramy (Elisha Henig) in school on Sept. 11, 2001, returning from a morning bathroom break to find teachers weeping and his classmates already looking at him differently.
The 10-episode season suggests that “Ramy” has plenty of room to expand. Two late installments focus on Dena, who chafes under her family’s paternalism, and Ramy’s mother, Maysa (Hiam Abbass, in a spectacular performance of her character’s loneliness both as an immigrant and as a mother of grown children). It’s a welcome break in a largely male-POV series.
“Ramy” is proof why better representation makes for better TV. It can tell deeper stories because no character has to stand in for an entire culture. Ramy’s boorish uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli), an anti-Semite who works with Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District, would be dicey as the only Muslim in a series. Here, he’s one more difficult family member Ramy has to deal with.
And Ramy’s community in turn is only one aspect of the world of Islam, we see as he meets his Egyptian relatives, among them a cousin obsessed with Ashton Kutcher and elders who admire President Donald Trump and believe that President Obama was a Muslim. (“His name is Barack Hussein Obama. What is he, Chinese?”) The encounter both broadens the world of “Ramy” and shows the character Ramy the gap between reality and his romanticized ideas about his roots.
“Ramy” pushes and prods; it’s not always comfortable. (The producers include Jerrod Carmichael, whose late “The Carmichael Show” made topical discomfort its brand.) Osama bin Laden (Christopher Tramantana) makes a surreal appearance. Youssef adapts a joke from his standup about how the day Trump declared the Muslim ban was a great one for him personally. (“I killed it at this meeting. I found a MetroCard that had $120 on it.”)
Sitcoms, from the original “The Goldbergs” to the remade “One Day at a Time,” are the virtual port of entry for groups to join the national community. “Ramy” is long overdue. It’s also right smack on time, coming at a moment when politicians are again harnessing Islamophobia and fear of the unfamiliar for an electoral power-up.
“Ramy” is an effective rebuttal to stereotyping for the same reason that it’s simply good TV: It’s a complex, funny series about messy and specifically drawn people. Its characters are not, to use the cliché, “just like us,” because this is a show that realizes no one is just like anyone else. They are distinctly themselves, and they’re worth getting to know better.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.