Somber Third Season of Ramy Takes a Great Show to Another Level | TV/Streaming
At the end of season two of the Emmy-nominated hit, Zainab (MaameYaa Boafo, in a near-flawless performance), Ramy’s wife of 24 hours, along with her father and Ramy’s mentor Sheikh Ali Malik (the ever-wonderful Mahershala Ali), walked out on Ramy after he confessed he’d slept with his cousin the night before the wedding. In the subsequent three years, Ramy has thrown himself into expanding his Uncle Naseem’s (Laith Nakli) diamond business. His bank account is burgeoning, but his faith is bankrupt. He hooks up with women he doesn’t like. Youssef has been beautifully deliberate about changing his onscreen affect to indicate Ramy’s near-total disconnect from his own feelings. Seasons One and Two Ramy had a goofy smile, and seemed fairly chilled out in general. That lovely smile is gone. The previously-relaxed facial muscles are slack, haunted, fully submissive to gravity dragging them to the floor. Even when accomplishing a business goal that caused him anxiety, Ramy does not exhibit, and likely does not experience, relief. The next set of worries has already set up shop in his head. Youssef won a Golden Globe for directing an episode of the series in 2019, but his name had better be on that list of nominees for Best Lead Actor at next year’s Emmys.
The “Ramy” writers’ room forces the audience to sit in his social discomfort with him. You cannot escape. You will marinate in the embarrassment until you’ve forgotten what it was like before you, let’s say, became so upset by the overt racism on a work trip to Israel that you absentmindedly congratulated an elderly woman for surviving the Holocaust. I screamed out loud, “Ramy, NO!” And yet I root for him. Season Three features some of the most horrifying things Ramy has done and said, and yet, I want him to get better. I know he can get better. But the long night of Ramy Hassan’s soul has only just begun.
The interconnectedness of choices on this season of “Ramy” is brilliant. Ramy’s mother Maysa (the criminally underrated Hiam Abbass) was known to make horribly insensitive remarks to Lyft passengers, especially black women and nonbinary folks. In Season Three, she has actively made a choice to be more tactful with her Instacart customers. But her unemployed husband Farouk (all hail Amr Waked) has chosen to accompany her because he, like my own father and immigrant dads around the world, is programmed to provide for his family right up till his respiratory system emits a death rattle. Without a steady paycheck, Farouk begins to come apart. He presses business cards into the hands of startled Instacart customers, advertising vague “life coaching” services. The authenticity of the Hassans’ dysfunction is aided by Waked and Abbass’ cosmic chemistry. In almost every episode, the directors often place Farouk and Maysa in separate frames, especially when they’re seated next to each other. For every furtive look of envy Abbass casts about a richly appointed room that is not hers, or flash of revulsion she aims at her husband as he talks about financial castles in the sky, Waked responds with an almost childlike detachment or self-satisfied superiority. Farouk’s choices leave Maysa behind, figuratively and literally, and the couple separates.
