Hollywood’s efforts to address its diversity problems have gone through some predictable but occasionally hilarious growing pains. Random minorities now pop up in all sorts of unexpected places, whether in the boardrooms of corporate America, in rural police departments, or in fantastical landscapes that once were the provenance of white actors wearing prosthetic ears.
Shows in the former category exist to show that minorities do exist in many of the same places that you’d expect to find wealthy white people: doctor’s offices, law firms, or private schools. Every fifth or so episode, these minorities still go to their parents’ house to eat a bowl of stew and whatever their country’s version of dumplings might be.
While that backstory, and Mo’s Muslim faith, are both vital to the show’s plot, “Mo” never quite falls into the usual martyrdom traps, in large part because Mo himself is not especially heroic or dignified. He, instead, is an aging lean addict who flies into irrational fits of anger that endanger his friends. He hustles fake watches and bags out the trunk of his car, and has grandiose illusions about how much he’s actually sacrificed for his family.
But Amer also has an eye for what defines immigrants outside of cultural theatre. In an episode late in the first season, Sameer has an incident at his job at a fast-food chicken spot. By this point, the audience has caught on to the fact that he is almost certainly on the autism spectrum; his family deals with his condition with a mix of doting and denial.