Most episodes of “#1 Happy Family USA” open with a disclaimer in the style of a rating screen you might see before a trailer at the movie theater. In a red banner across the screen, the phrase “Representation Warning” is written in big, bold white letters. Underneath, the text continues with “Do not use this animated show as cultural representation for the following communities: Muslims, Arabs,” and a third category that, depending on the episode, could be “People from New Jersey,” “White girls named Courtney,” or “Men.” Instead of a rating, the box at the bottom reads “H” for “Haram,” with text that says “Allah please forgive mistakes in this program.”
For series co-creator and star Ramy Youssef, the idea behind that tongue-in-cheek opening came from what he described as a “kind of exhaustion.” When the comedian’s break-out Hulu live-action series “Ramy” — a dramedy exploring a fictionalized version of both Youssef and his Egyptian family in New Jersey — first premiered in 2019, he saw headlines about it that he summed up like this: “‘Ramy’ on Hulu: Get ready Muslims, here’s your guy!’” For “Happy Family USA” — a cheeky animated comedy about an Egyptian family caught between embracing their culture and assimilating to American jingoism in the days after 9/11 — he wanted to sidestep that pressure entirely.
“The first thing you see is something that also kind of just takes the air out of the whole conversation,” Youssef tells IndieWire. “Please allow this to be dumb and stupid. Please allow this to not have to be some emblem for everything. And there will be a lot of people who connect to it, but also a lot of people won’t. And that’s kind of the whole point.”
Much like “Ramy,” “#1 Happy Family USA” (which premiered on Amazon Prime on April 17) is too specific and personal to Youssef’s own life experiences to serve as sweepingly general “representation.” Co-created with “South Park” vet Pam Brady, the series features Youssef voicing both a stand-in for himself named Rumi as well as a version of his father named Hussein Hussein, a halal food cart owner, with the other members of the animated family — such as Rumi’s closeted older sister Mona (Alia Shawkat) and practical mother Sharia (Salma Hindy) — taking inspiration from their real-life counterparts.
Although the show is often ridiculous — an out-there animated series that loves a zany dick joke or a musical number — it’s core storyline comes from a painful place. In the pilot, the family is living a fairly typical early 2000s existence in their sleepy New Jersey suburb: Rumi’s grandfather died, putting a strain on Hussein and Sharia’s relationship, while Mona grapples with coming out to her parents. Then, the 9/11 terrorist attacks happen, and suddenly their neighbors avoid them on the street and Rumi goes from just another kid to a school pariah.
Fans of “Ramy” might be reminded of “Strawberries,” the standout fourth episode from the show’s 2019 first season. Like “#1 Happy Family USA,” that flashback episode focused on a young version of the fictional Ramy as he endured social rejection and sudden suspicion from others after 9/11 kickstarted a wave of Islamophobia in American culture. According to Ramy, the experience of writing and filming that episode, combined with the positive feedback from audiences, caused him to consider different ways to approach the same point in time. While the idea percolated since 2019, he acknowledges it has even greater resonance at this particular political moment.
“We got a slice of it, but there’s so much that continues to refract into pretty much every interaction we’re having today. There’s the writer part of me that was like, ‘Oh, we already did one thing. But then the true character explorer in me was like, ‘That was just the beginning,’” Youssef tells IndieWire. “This show captures the beginning of heavy surveillance on individual civilians and a certain pressure to perform patriotism. And I don’t know if we’ve ever been asked to perform patriotism more than this week. It almost feels like if you are at the airport with a brown name, you’ve got to be saying ‘#1 Happy Family USA.’”
While Youssef had vague ideas for the series in 2019, development kickstarted in earnest when he and Brady had a Zoom call in 2020. “Honestly, I was lightly stalking Ramy,” Brady says about their first meeting. “I loved his show and his comedic voice so much that I was begging my manager, ‘Can you please just get me a meeting?’ And that’s all I thought was gonna happen. It was really a fan meeting.” However, the two hit it off, and their discussion about Youssef’s idea helped lead to a more fleshed out pitch for an animated series.
“In the best way, animation signals, ‘Yo, we’re about to show you a bunch of dumb ass shit, let’s have a good time,’” Youssef says. “And to have that be the tone as you take on serious things, especially for some of the things we cover, from funerals to national security, if it wasn’t animated, I think we’d be making, ‘Homeland’ or something.”
The end result of their work, “#1 Happy Family USA,” looks (intentionally) like it could have been on TV at the same time the series is set. Youssef says he wanted the show to have a “nostalgia” and warmth to it, and found the Malaysian company Animasia to produce the art; the team had to downgrade their computers to match what the animation team was using. “We wanted it to feel almost like it was DIY, that this show could have existed on Nickelodeon or something in the ’90s,’” Brady says. “So we just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t polished. It felt like it was coming from a singular point of view.”
The medium of animation also allowed Brady and Youssef to create unique visual metaphors to get the audience into the head of Rumi, a middle-schooler struggling painfully to fit in. The most prominent, and the first one that Youssef came up with, is how code switching within the series, as Hussein pushes his family to give up their culture and assimilate, is depicted: When the family leaves their home, they experience a static glitch of sorts, one that alters their appearance to align with the company they’re keeping. “I think there is a universal feeling that anyone has, which is, ‘I gotta be different when I’m outside of my house and when I’m inside my house,’” Youssef said. “Here, the stakes are way higher. And then we get to actually show that. We get to watch a beard disappear. We get to watch curly hair become straight. We get to watch a kid try to bury his curls under a hat, which I used to do as a kid.”
“We’re playing around with how scary it is just to be a kid growing up anyway. And then you add this extra layer that the world is suspicious of you,” Brady says. “We just want it to make people feel what that was like.”
Although the entire animated Hussein family receives spotlight episodes and storylines throughout the first season, the core of the show is Rumi and Hussein, and their separate struggles with their culture and assimilation. Originally, Youssef was only supposed to voice Rumi, with Hussein being played by another actor.
However, after seeing several auditions for the part and not being satisfied, Brady pushed Youssef to voice Hussein himself, believing that having him inhabit a version of his father added to the show’s unique point of view. To play both lead roles, Youssef took different inspirations for each character. His Rumi vocals came from a video his sister Reem shared with production of him doing a “video book report,” which helped him unlock the raspy voice he uses for his child stand-in.
Hussein’s voice was a longer process for Youssef to find, and he says the end result doesn’t actually sound much like his actual father. To figure out the character during a recording session at a studio, Youssef experimented with playing music in Hussein’s voice with a guitar. The songwriting process led to two songs that Hussein sings throughout the show that capture his complexities: One is the theme song, a manic musical number where he addresses his suspicious neighbors to assure them that the family is patriotic and innocent. The other, “Money for the Meat,” is a sad pleading dirge, as Hussein begs customers to eat at his halal cart.
“The voice was found organically oscillating between this kind of introspective, haunting music, and then this like manifestation of a manic love for everyone in his life,” Youssef says. “After a couple of months, I was able to do a whole session or a whole scene going between the two, because I figured out how to do them physically.”
After a season centered squarely on the Husseins’ domestic lives, “#1 Happy Family USA” pivots abruptly in its final minutes. After having started an AOL chat message friendship with President George W. Bush, Rumi is kidnapped from his home and thrown off a plane into Iraq, with the president himself directing the child to help the U.S. military track down and kill Osama Bin Laden.
Viewers left itching to know what will happen after that unexpected cliffhanger can rest easy, because Amazon gave the animated series a two-season order. Discussing what’s to come for the show, Youssef and Brady say the sophomore run will see the show expand past its current scope, covering the political post 9/11 situation with more detail than in Season 1, where it serves more as a backdrop for Rumi’s life.
“Our emphasis in Season 1 was this middle school at the heart of this large global situation. And we flipped the recipe for season two, where we throw Rumi right into the large global situation,” Youssef tells IndieWire. “In this really cool way, we get to dig deep and wide and tap into a lot of stuff that you could only do in a second season. What you feel there at the end is certainly a barometer of where we’re going.”
“It gets fairly big,” Brady says. “And Ramy plays a pretty integral role in the War on Terror.”
All eight episodes of “#1 Happy Family USA” are streaming now on Prime Video.
