What occurs when the political satire of “South Park” collides with a Muslim child’s coming-of-age story in post-9/11 New Jersey? You get the animated sitcom “#1 Happy Family USA.”
Cocreated and coshowrun by Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady, the A24 manufacturing, which premieres Thursday on Prime Video, follows Rumi Hussein (voiced by Youssef) and his household as they navigate the “see something, say something” paranoia of the early 2000s.
However inside 24 hours, the Al Qaeda assaults flip the Husseins from a median dysfunctional household with unlucky names right into a suspected terror cell.
“#1 Happy Family USA” follows a Muslim boy’s coming-of-age story.
(Prime Video)
Rumi’s father, a physician turned halal cart proprietor, goes into assimilation overdrive to show his household is 110% American and completely not related to anybody named Osama. Outdated Glory, Christmas decor and Easter trimmings all of a sudden pop up of their entrance yard. He shaves his beard off. He insists that his spouse cease sporting her hijab, which makes Sharia, who’s a receptionist for an eccentric dentist (Kieran Culkin), all of the extra decided to don her headband.
In the meantime, Rumi’s classmates now eye him suspiciously regardless of his makes an attempt to slot in with the opposite boys by sporting his new basketball jersey. However the bootleg “Bulls” shirt reads “Balls” as an alternative. It’s additionally three sizes too massive and appears like a costume. Clearly he’s not just like the others.
Components of the storyline mirror Youssef’s childhood montages in his Hulu sequence “Ramy,” however the medium of grownup animation allowed him to “go wild” with the story and characters. He additionally started working with Brady, an authority on pushing animated satire to hilarious extremes.
Brady collaborated with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on “South Park” from the present’s begin, occurring to cowrite with them the movie “Team America: World Police” and cocreating the Netflix comedy sequence “Lady Dynamite.” “As soon as I saw ‘Ramy’ and I saw his stand-up, I was a fan,” mentioned Brady. “I kept begging my manager: ‘Please, can I meet Ramy?’ So I came at it honestly as a fan, knowing that this guy’s doing some next-level stuff. I keep joking with my friends that Ramy’s a real writer. He explores characters. That’s why this experience has been so amazing because it’s pushed me. It’s like, ‘Oh, this is how you do it.’”
Mona Chalabi, Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady are the inventive forces behind “#1 Happy Family USA.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
Illustrator and government producer Mona Chalabi designed the characters, every harkening again to animation kinds of the late ’90s and early 2000s reveals like “Futurama” or “Daria.”
“I wanted it to feel like a found tape,” mentioned Youssef. “You pop it in and it looks like it could have been on Comedy Central or MTV [back then]. It’s hand-drawn animation and we made it with an animation studio in Malaysia [called Animasia]. It’s an all-Muslim animation house, which is so crazy. They were so happy to draw hijabs and all these characters. They were like, ‘We relate to it!’ But we even downgraded our computers here in order to make it like it would have been made. Whatever we did took a while and it was like the opposite of AI.”
Provides Brady, “We wanted to make sure, especially with the visuals and the direction and the pacing, that the show felt familiar. That you’d seen a show like this before. We didn’t want to reinvent the form, but we also didn’t want to make it look like ‘Family Guy.’ So it’s like, ‘Oh, this show existed in 1998. You remember it, right?’”
Although the present takes place some 25 years in the past, it’s not exhausting to see the plot’s resonance at present within the wake of the deportations and roundups of immigrants and college students. The Husseins are up towards a wave of Islamophobia, triggered by the 9/11 assaults. They embody the very actual concern of being profiled by the skin world, together with FBI agent Dan Daniels (voiced by Timothy Olyphant), who occurs to reside throughout the road. A darkish interval, to make certain, but additionally one wealthy in comedic worth for those who’re keen to go there as “#1 Happy Family USA” does. Its characters get away into track whereas on the verge of being swept up by Homeland Safety, or inadvertently trigger a widespread panic by dropping on the carpet on the airport to hope once they be taught of the fear assaults.
“We were trying to kind of create this time capsule, like around the old DHS of this moment,” mentioned Youssef. “But right now is a time when an immigrant family, and surely a Muslim family, would feel the need to shout, ‘We’re No. 1! Happy Family USA!’ Pam and Mona and I have all been looking at each other with like, ‘Whoa.’ Of all the times this thing could have dropped, it’s dropping right now, when [it’s hard] to joke about this stuff in any other medium.”
At a time when every thing looks like a merciless joke, “#1 Happy Family USA” bites again with the satire we’d like.
