The third season, like its predecessors, sometimes relies on graceless provocations that never mature in a way that advances the story. At its worst, “Ramy” can feel like a disjointed sketch comedy-a vessel for Youssef’s humorous observations about urbane Muslim-immigrant culture. But it’s also the season with the clearest plotline and character development.

Season 3, which premièred on September 30th, isn’t much cheerier-at least not until the very end. The season closes with Ramy sitting in an abandoned car listening to a CD about ablution, the Muslim cleansing ritual performed before prayer-a spiritual gesture of repentance. By the end of Season 2, he has had an affair with his cousin, wrecked his new marriage (to a virgin) the very day it began, and is estranged from his sheikh, who also happens to be his father-in-law, whom he’d grown very attached to. He blithely hooks up with white women, but expects purity from Muslim women. Many of these ideals, as we find out in the first season, are no longer upheld by his peers in Egypt, where his father is from and, yet, Ramy remains attached to them, at least aspirationally. Most of the narrative tension comes from Ramy’s misguided attempts-and repeated failures-to live a life in accordance with Muslim ideals. He actually believes in God-“like, ‘God’ God, not yoga,” as he puts it in Season 1. He subscribes to the same set of beliefs that have long made Muslims such impregnable narrative characters. That is, of course, unless they are secular Muslims-the kind beloved by liberal Americans, who like to feel virtuous for having “diversity” in their friend groups. Onscreen, these characters are clumsy or flat-weak and pitiable (if they are women), odious villains (if they are men). Outside of countries where they are a majority, Muslims are often seen as the unmediating executioners of an abstract religion, as if their faith robs them of all other desires and conflicts. If this feels like a low bar, that’s because it is. At long last, here was a Muslim “Atlanta,” a “High Maintenance” for New Jersey Muslims. Brisk episodes, each with its own internal plotline-one episode entirely devoted to Ramy’s mother, another to his sister-stood on their own like neat vignettes. Set in New Jersey, a state with one of the highest percentages of Muslims in the U.S., the show captured the immigrant-Muslim American world in its specificity: the wallah bros with their religious hypocrisies, the masjid uncles with their haughty self-righteousness. Muslims who drank, had sex, lied to their parents, and felt guilty about it. The semi-autobiographical comedy, co-created by Ramy Youssef, an Egyptian American who plays himself, introduced us to a sweep of Muslim characters who felt real: Muslims who believed in God, but also in material things. When “Ramy” first débuted, in 2019, it was astonishingly fresh.

Cameo necklace mother and child