Mo Amer Took Season 2 of ‘Mo’ on a Walkabout from ‘Shawshank Redemption’ to Bob Ross
Mo Najjar (Mo Amer) can’t catch a break — and that’s entirely by design. Season 2 of “Mo” begins with our heroic Houston hustler stranded in Mexico City without an easy way back to the United States at the very moment his family might finally get refugee status. His trials to recover and make a place for himself in America, as well as a set of surreal dream sequences hinting at something more, only ramp up from there.
It feels like an impossible challenge even before Mo is formally deported. However, because he is stateless and cannot actually be sent back to Palestine, the Netflix comedy nails the absurdity of the U.S. immigration system: Once he’s deported, he can stay. By the moment in Episode 7 when Mo falls out of a hammock and into a pile of shit, all you can do is laugh.
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The show’s masterful blending of humor and catharsis has always been the engine driving it forward. But in Season 2, Amer took on additional directing duties, not so much to expand the visual vocabulary of the series — which has always been more sunkissed and sweeping than your average half-hour comedy under the direction of Solvan “Slick” Naim — but to use all the cinematic tools at the series’ disposal to put his character through it.
“I wanted to deport [Mo] right out of the gate. If I had completely had it my way, I would’ve deported him from the get-go and piled on as much shit as possible to navigate through,” Amer told IndieWire. “I feel like the more we put on our main character, the more we’re going to tap into the drama of [the situation], but also we’re going to get a lot of comedy. So I really, really wanted to go for it this season.”
Part of how Amer and Naim go for it is with a set of dream sequences Mo has across the season that take on genres and tones related to his emotional state. Amer and Teresa Ruiz’s Maria get to act as big as a mansion in their own telenovela while Mo’s in Mexico; Amer dons Andy Dufrane’s coveralls for a “Shawshank Redemption”-style breakout of an ICE detention facility; a “Hurt Locker”-esque war movie happens mid-argument with his brother Sameer (Omar Elba), while a vision of Israeli soldiers melting down guns is what Amer paints while in front of Bob Ross’s easel.
“Within the dreams, all the rules are out the window so you can play with it as much as you want, with the cinematography, you can put flashbacks within the dream,” Amer said. “It’s a really fun way, an emotional way and a comedic way, to cinematically play with all these different layers.”
Although it was no mere matter of play for Amer to crawl through the length of tunnel the production team built for the “Shawshank” recreation. “About halfway through, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is a good idea.’ I was so jacked up and I didn’t put any pads or elbow pads on and it’s a real steel thing that’s rimmed and I’m getting my butt kicked. I couldn’t believe I was doing it,” Amer said. “[But] once we got into post, I was so happy we did it and had this complete vision of the whole thing.”
If the first season of “Mo” was about figuring out how to jump in and out of fantasy sequences and give the series a rich sense of place, then Season 2 and Episode 8 specifically is Amer using camera placement, composition, and shooting rhythm to land BMX-style flips. The production went to Malta to shoot much of that final episode, “A Call From God,” which covers Mo and his family finally getting to visit their relatives in the West Bank — and here Amer and his writing team smartly cut the Najjars a break; they leave to return to America on October 6, 2023.
The dream sequences are Amer’s and his team’s way of answering an impossible question: “How can you deliver a message of peace and serenity? I’m like, Bob Ross is the great medium for that,” Amer said. “For [Ross] to say, ‘Isn’t it fantastic? It’s amazing what you could do when you change your mind,’ you know?… I’m speaking to everyone through Bob Ross. So it’s an interesting way to communicate things using comedy and seeing the vision of guns melting and going away and seeing people happy about this shift. It was really powerful to me to be able to do that visually.”
Amer also visually pays off all the stress Mo has been carrying in a sequence where he gets to perform the call to prayer in the same mosque where his father installed the PA system. The intensely autobiographical moment is covered in a circular, unbroken take; it required Amer not just to access the emotion of the moment in front of the camera but to manage all the logistics behind it.
“I wanted to capture him [feeling] everything flooding to him and just get like this wonderful 360 of his whole world is spinning kind of vibe, but it’s like breaking down, but he’s not holding on to it. He’s happy. He’s elated. It’s like a completely bittersweet moment,” Amer said. “But it’s 1 p.m., and the mosque is open and you’ve gotta — people still had to pray. So literally, I had one and a half takes to get that part.”
On the first go, the camera bumped something, and Amer needed to adjust while staying in the emotion of the moment, but the team was able to adjust and pick up the remainder of the shot. “That’s the behind-the-scenes on that, is that I wanted to emotionally capture and see a very human side of Mo,” Amer said.
It’s to the show’s credit that while the plot and scripts involve a lot of scheming and a fair amount of Lucha wrestling on Season 2 of “Mo,” the camera is what gets at the characters’ humanity. “Playing with the moment and the timing and the cameras was really, really fun for me. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, just to have a different perspective and not do something so traditional, especially when it’s supposed to be a traditional comedy sitcom,” Amer said.
“Mo” — which is anything but a traditional comedy sitcom — is now available to stream on Netflix.
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