Actor-writer-director Ramy Youssef’s new Prime Video series #1 Happy Family USA takes viewers back to 2001-era America, and offers a clear-eyed view at the experiences of an Arab-American family as they try to fit in and survive in a world impacted by hate and prejudice. The 2D-animated show, which features the voices of Youssef, Alia Shawkat, Mandy Moore, Salma Hindy, Timothy Olyphant and Kieren Culkin, is described as being “inspired by the childhood nightmares” of Youssef.

We recently caught up with Youssef and the show’s co-creator and executive producer Pam Brady (South Park, Lady Dynamite), and British journalist/illustrator Mona Chalabi (executive producer and writer), who spoke with Animation Magazine about the challenges and rewards of making the first season of this well-received animated series.

“We felt that era had never really been looked at from a different point of view and that animation would be an amazing way to get into a lot of the things that were happening at the time,” says Youssef, who is best known for his stand-up comedy and acclaimed shows such as Mo and Ramy. “The crazy journey of this show is that maybe it started as a time capsule, but now it feels very much like today, just in terms of a family dealing with the surveillance state.”

Youseff says he grew up loving South Park, so he was thrilled to land the opportunity to work with animation veteran and exec producer Pam Brady.

Tackling Touch Issue with Humor

“I think even back then, South Park and The Daily Show were the only shows that cut deeper in terms of making real political commentaries,” he explains. “I was also a big fan of what Mona Chalabi’s visual journalism and the way she used illustrations to speak about things that were very important. She was really great with designing the characters helping with this idea that our characters would be code switching — and looking and acting differently when they were inside and outside their homes. We kind of played with the details of what they wanted to hide and how they would look on our show.”

Brady says he was a big fan of Youssef as well. “I was lightly stalking him,” she recalls. “The idea came to me because he had done a flashback episode on his Hulu show where he was a kid and he had this fantasy world. He wanted to explore that idea more, and he thought that animation would be the best way to execute that idea.”

The show’s storyboard artists and creative team is based in L.A., but the animation production was handled by Animasia in Malaysia. “They really helped us by getting this unique look for our show, which doesn’t look like modern digital animation,” notes Youssef. “Early on, Mona and I wanted the show to look like something that could have been produced in 2000. We actually had to downgrade and get our hands on older computers to deal with the systems that we used for the show. I think it added to this feeling of looking different from the other animated shows we see today!”

Brady agrees, “They brought this unique, handmade quality to the animation. What we also loved about them was they were making a lot of choices based on our storyboards. So, they were seeing American during that period through their Malaysian lens, and that was even cooler for us. Because the show was now also being interpreted by a non-American point of view.”

Allah is in the Details

“So much thought went into the went into the characters, and I worked very closely with the character design team,” says Chalabi. “I’m also very proud of the background designs on the show. I’m so pleased with how the interior of the home, the school and the mosque all feel so much different from other shows. Our background design team did such a phenomenal job with packing in actually a lot more detail that I’d say you see in animated TV series.”

Youssef mentions that the show took him back to a time in his childhood when the outside world could make him afraid of who he was, as a child of Arab immigrants in the U.S. “Growing up, I witnessed the beginning of surveillance at the mosque — or later, when I went to college, at our student association,” he recalls. “As a child, you don’t really know how to process these things because you’re still forming your sense of self. The young boy in our show is constantly being chased by this fear. The other engine of the series is the father who’s just trying to make a living. Those things especially resonated with me, but that family is not really my family. My mother doesn’t wear a hijab. What some of the sisters on the show go through were based on our writers’ room, which had about 10 people — some where people I had worked with in the past, and others were people that I’d always wanted to work with.”

The three-time Emmy-nominated actor tells us that he was a big fan of animation from an early age. “I remember just running home to watch Dragon Ball Z. (We actually pay homage to that show in our second season!) I also loved Hey Arnold! and the way it captured life in New York City. It was a show that always made me laugh and the characters were so rich. There is so much great animation happening right now. For example, there’s a super hilarious show out of Netflix Saudi Arabia called Masameer Country.”

Animation also allowed Youssef and his creative team to tackle subjects that would hit completely differently in a live-action show. “There are so many things that would feel too dramatic or incredibly offensive, but there’s something about animation that allows you to do crazier things but at the same time, you can show the heart,” Youssef points out. “You really feel for these characters and you really understand what they’re coming from. Even when we go crazy with what we’re exploring, it’s very clear that none of it is malicious or mean spirited: It’s more about getting to explore these complex feelings an ideas in this medium. One of the things we were able to do was to allow the story and characters build throughout the first season. The stories could be self-contained, but it was a lot of fun to build it into something. We actually leave season one kind of making it clear that the second season will actually live in a totally different world.”

Chalabi believes that the show’s central family is the heart of the whole thing. “I really love the family,” she says. “I really care about these characters and feel so much tenderness and love for all of them. Even for the villains on the show (like the evil auntie), I know why she is the way she is, and I love her regardless.”

Drawn to Family Dynamics

Brady agrees: “The family is the fundamental part of this show. The reason we can do weird and super silly satire is because I think people will care about the characters. Because if you don’t have that, you won’t believe that a lamb can talk to our main character. So, we spent a lot of time just thinking about the characters. The way Mona designed them also makes them feel real, but also make them feel like a little bit of an abstraction. I remember as we were designing the Rumi character, we just kept wanting to make him cuter and cuter!”

Youssef, who voices both the father and his son in # 1 Happy Family USA, says it took him a couple of months to figure out the two big voices. “Something that really helped me was going back and finding the videos I used to do in school when I was assigned book reports,” he recalls. “I watched these videos of myself as a kid, where I had this really raspy and sometimes high-pitched voice. It was my sister who also works on the show in production who found those clips of me as a young boy. She said, ‘Hey, when you were a kid, you had a really funny voice. I think your character should sound like this!’ So, that’s what I did!”

He also says he hopes the show will hold up a mirror to today’s stark socio-political climate in the country. “I just hope that people can watch what it looks like to put a group of people under not only the pressures of the surveillance state but also capitalism. One of the big struggle that this family has that is also shared by many immigrants is that they are in this loop where they’re very concerned about being able to make a living. But, overall, I think this is a show for everybody.”

 

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The first season of #1 Happy Family USA is now streaming on Prime Video.