Ramy.

To give her credit, my sister told me about this show a long time ago, and I didn’t watch it because I don’t like to be told what to do. But then my boyfriend told me about it not too long ago, and I watched it because I’m obsessed with him. I was hesitant to write about it because I’m not sure why I specifically love this show. I think it’s just a good show. It's smart. It’s well-written and well-timed. It swings, maybe perfectly at times, between being funny and being (suddenly) intense. It questions our assumptions about the people we don’t know and also teases minorities in a way that you only can when you know them. It’s about who we date and why and how isolating difference can be. It’s about the sacrifices we make for what we believe in, and how sometimes we regret those sacrifices, even momentarily, even just because we’re afraid of missing out on whatever was on the other side. I don’t know, I’ve found it to be a show that makes me root for the protagonist not because he’s wholly good but because he’s trying (sometimes terribly) to be alive.

There’s this bizarre 9/11 episode that somehow boils down to strawberries in a way that I found surprising & poetic.

There’s this episode where Ramy’s mom becomes a (terrible) Lyft driver & then makes an unlikely friend.

There’s an episode where Ramy’s sister begins to break out of what everyone, as a Muslim woman, expects her to be, and her rebellion is neither a fairy tale nor a curse.

It’s a thoughtful show and striking and aware in more than one direction, which I love.

I’m still working through it, almost done with the first season, and while sometimes sit-coms make me restless—I think I prefer the long and tortouous stretch of a drama, where the same problem keeps getting more and more complicated instead of resolved (the moody Scorpio in me?)—I’ve found Ramy to be a bit different than other sit-coms I’ve seen. It’s episodic but has the pull of a drama in a way, or at least, will jerk you every now and then far past the surface of things.

I think at this weird time of year where winter’s over but we’re not in summer, where we just hustled through but can’t quite relax, it’s comforting to watch a show where you know things will get resolved eventually, even if you have to go through the ringer a bit along the way.

Image: Hulu