Ramy’s enduring – at times, too enduring – passivity in the face of consequences defines the whole second season, which like the first contains several side-character capsules in which he disappears entirely (Hiam Abbass, as his brittle yet deeply sympathetic mother Maysa, once again delivers a standout turn). Ramy commits to honesty, then dodges the truth on the last time he masturbated with a technicality.

But the application proves harder, the glitch of the whole season. Ramy’s intent seems straightforward enough: to kill the ego. His comedy lies in small justifications and mundane excuses – he had sex with a married woman during Ramadan, but “I just want you to know,” he reassures, that it was during eating hours. “I feel like I have this hole inside of me that’s always been there, this kind of emptiness, and I’m always trying to fill it with something,” he unspools to the sheikh. Reeling from his … problematic tryst in Egypt, called out by his friends for skipping prayers and masturbating too much, Ramy seeks the sheikh’s mentorship with the energy of a skittish puppy dog. His one moment of communal release and transcendence, at a Sufi center in Cairo, manifests as an attraction to his cousin.įor its second season, Ramy recruits two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali to play a Sufi sheikh leading a mixed congregation at an adapted church picketed by Islamophobic locals. I wanna pray, I wanna go to the party, and I’m breaking some rules, I’m following others,” he tells his cousin in Egypt in one of his many attempts to justify spinning his wheels. In the first season’s final two transfixing episodes, Ramy travels to Egypt, a country he has romanticized but not visited in years, in search of a magic clarity pill on who to be, but instead of a Muslim panacea finds a real country of complicated people – naively Trump-supporting relatives, alcohol. Ramy is a contradictory character, a spiritual jester attuned to both Friday prayers and Friday night – “I’m like at both. And, more pointedly for viewers in the fractious summer of 2020: a portrait of the many ways self-improvement turns self-serving, apologies mask as empty pleas for absolution, and enlightenment serves as exploitation of another. The first season was a boon for critics – an underrepresented perspective, daring, underseen, worthy of a major Golden Globe win – but its second season, which premiered last week, lifts it to a must-see: an ambitious, contradictory and refractive exploration of one man’s sisyphean trek toward meaning and spirituality in a deeply profane, messy and sometimes wondrous world.

Boon tv series episodes