Meet N.J.’s ‘#1 Happy Family USA.’ Creator Ramy Youssef on must-see animated series.

All hail America’s newest animated family.

Meet the Husseins.

They’re Amazon‘s “#1 Happy Family USA,” and they live in the great state of New Jersey.

The must-see adult comedy series, premiering Thursday on Prime Video, is set in the early 2000s and follows the Egyptian American Muslim family after Sept. 11, 2001.

Though set in a sobering post-9/11 climate, the show is a sharp, riotously funny satire with a lot of heart, along with some choice cringe moments and songs both catchy and tender.

In the first episode, we’re introduced to middle schooler Rumi Hussein, his father Hussein Hussein, his mother Sharia Hussein and his older sister Mona Hussein ... on Sept. 10, 2001.

The Hackensack family is dealing with life’s daily travails when the unthinkable happens. The terror attacks have people glaring at them in their Jersey neighborhood and create problems for Rumi at school.

“Things are going to change for us,” Hussein tells his family. “People are going to look at us differently just because of who we are.”

His new strategy for navigating America: Blend in, never stick out, always be cheerful.

“We, from today, have no culture,” Hussein announces. “When people see our family, they won’t think ‘Arab,’ they will think ‘They are happy, they are perfect.’ We are No. 1 happy family U-S-A!”

Ramy Youssef, a Golden Globe-winning actor, comedian, writer, director and producer from New Jersey, created the show with Pam Brady from “South Park.”

While the series handles plenty of heavy topics — among them, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate and discrimination and the pressure to assimilate and erase culture — it is a smart, laugh-out-loud (or LOL, as one internet slang-talking character would put it) show that will leave you wanting to see more.

Youssef, who voices 12-year-old Rumi and his father Hussein, spoke with NJ Advance Media before the show’s debut.

The series creator, showrunner and producer, who grew up in Rutherford, has become a major player in TV since the 2019 premiere of his Jersey-set live-action series “Ramy.” He won the 2020 Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy series for his performance in the Hulu show.

“I think the thing that I’m always really interested in examining is kind of the self ... as opposed to it necessarily being a story about characters who are being persecuted,” he says. “I think that their biggest struggle is who they are in the midst of all of it. I think that’s where we have the most fun, because we literally watch them change who they are.”

READ MORE: N.J. actor Ramy Youssef talks ‘Poor Things,’ Rutherford and Gaza

In his quest to blend in, Hussein becomes a big advocate of code-switching, mandating it for every member of his family.

The fast-paced show, which spans eight half-hour episodes, illustrates this with a kind of force field barrier between the family’s home and the outside world. When they pass through it, their clothes and appearance change.

“This is where it’s so fun to do it in animation,” says Youssef, 34, who first started working on the series five years ago.

“That’s the thing that I’m always gonna go back to, which is, it’s less what’s being done to you ... how are you operating and how are you viewing yourself with everything that’s happening around you?”

Hussein scrambles to blot out his heritage under the watchful eye of his new neighbor, FBI agent Dan Daniels (Timothy Olyphant), and Rumi gets a crash course on code-switching from his friend Marcus (“SNL” alum Chris Redd), who is Black.

“Being yourself in public is a very white thing to be able to do,” he tells Rumi, breezing through an array of looks he deploys for various occasions.

“Most kids in my class think I’m a straight-haired Italian,” says Rumi’s sister Mona, played by Alia Shawkat.

But her brother’s code-switching attempts are full of glitches. In one moment he goes from a sweater-wearing Bill Cosby to a preppy brah with a popped collar to a Harry Potter kid from Hogwarts.

A halal cart at Fox News

Rumi’s daily woes at home and school are a throughline in the series.

Youssef fans won’t have a hard time recognizing his voice.

However, he sounds a lot different as Hussein.

Rumi’s dad has a thick accent that makes “Fox News” sound like “Fockis News,” which he says often. That’s because he owns a halal cart that he parks outside the News Corp building in Manhattan. It gets a little harder to use the bathroom there after 9/11, but Hussein’s overtures to become more American land him a gig as a Fox commentator dubbed “Halal Harry.”

Youssef’s experiences living in an Egyptian American Muslim family in New Jersey inform the series, but he wasn’t channeling any family members with Hussein.

“He, in many ways, is a wholly new creation,” Youssef says. “I mean, I think I wanted to find something that felt like it captured the anxiety and stress of a parent, but also had an emotional aspect to it. I didn’t want him to just feel mean, but I wanted him to feel so concerned that he almost seems crazy and then I think he has this other side to him that is incredibly tender.”

Before Hussein came to the U.S., he worked as a cardiothoracic surgeon. Now he seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders as he tries to become sufficiently American. Doing everything he can to get in his neighbors’ good graces, he throws on a cowboy hat and decks out the family home in red, white and blue.

Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator and writer Mona Chalabi, who is also a writer and executive producer on the show, worked on the look of the characters.

One who won’t be doing any code-switching is Rumi’s grandmother (Randa Jarrar), who unlike his hijab-wearing mother, wears a niqab that covers her whole body. She also won’t be giving up her TV, which rolls alongside her on a cart at all times, inside and outside the house.

While the assumption might be that a conservatively dressed grandmother has conservative values, she proves to be pretty open-minded. (And a pretty good speed driver on a frantic dash to Newark Airport.)

When Mona agonizes over whether or not to tell her parents about her sexuality and her girlfriend, Grandma has already figured it out. She offers her granddaughter some solace on a transcendent, hookah-fueled trip, after which they find themselves emptied onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, like in “Being John Malkovich.”

READ MORE: Meet Ramy Youssef, star of ‘Ramy,’ the show that breaks new ground while drawing on his N.J. roots

“I got really lucky because I got to have a bit of a relationship with all my grandparents,” Youssef says.

“The levels of pressure that are removed when it’s not your actual kid ... many get to have this experience of getting this version of their grandparent that even your parent is like ‘where was that guy?’ All of a sudden they’re really cool and friendly and whatever. They’re just inherently less pressed because they’re like ‘Yeah, I’m done having to raise, so I can kind of just be cool.’ And I think we definitely tapped into that with Grandma.”

Home sweet Hackensack

Why did the pride of Rutherford set his series a few miles up Route 17?

“I always loved the way Hackensack sounded,“ Youssef says. ”It just sounds like someone’s coughing. And it felt really funny for animated characters to say and to be in. I obviously pretty much infuse Jersey into everything I’m doing, maybe even more than being Arab or Muslim. I mean, I love Jersey, so it’s always kind of looming there in the background.”

Garden State-flavored details in the show include the Jersey Devil wearing a Devils jersey and Gabagool Middle School.

Rumi, a student there, is ranked despairingly low on his family’s “cousin leaderboard,” stacked with those who have made their parents proud with glowing achievements.

But if there is a real leaderboard, Youssef is surely at the top.

“Ramy,” which has run for three seasons on Hulu, stars Youssef as Ramy Hassan, a Egyptian American millennial whose Muslim family lives in North Jersey.

In the show, which Youssef co-created, Ramy seeks answers to questions about faith, relationships and how to be a good and/or better person.

“Ramy” premiered almost exactly six years ago as groundbreaking TV. The series chucked out timeworn stereotypes long used for Arab and Muslim characters in favor of presenting real humans with all of their joys, heartaches, flaws and dreams.

One episode in the first season featured a flashback to Ramy’s childhood in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The character and his family get dirty looks from neighbors and kids who used to be friendly turn on Ramy. There is so much fear going around that he becomes afraid of himself and has a surreal dream about Osama bin Laden, who tells him he doesn’t belong in America.

The episode got Youssef thinking about revisiting that period of time in an animated series.

“There was kind of a huge floodgate of stories from that era,” he says.

READ MORE: N.J. star Ramy Youssef talks Gaza, Biden and book reports in ‘More Feelings’ comedy special

“I think part of what was exciting for me was just kind of exploring all these really big, tough-to-digest things from the point of view of a kid and of kids ... The great thing about growing up in Jersey is that it was diverse, and to this day, there’s a big diversity of opinion and people. And I think that that allowed me, just as a creative person, to kind of be able to have all sorts of perspectives. I mean, I love the town I grew up in, and I love the people I grew up with.

“It never got to a point where it felt blindingly hard to be yourself, but it did feel like you could kind of experience a bunch of the emotions that we kind of highlight here in a way where, certainly to my kid self, it felt real.”

Some more credentials for the cousin leaderboard:

Youssef made his film debut alongside Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 Oscar-winning movie “Poor Things.”

His second HBO comedy special, “More Feelings,” filmed at home in Jersey, premiered last year. In January, the critically acclaimed second season of “Mo,” the show he co-created with Palestinian American comedian Mo Amer, arrived on Netflix.

Next, Youssef will star in the HBO movie “Mountainhead,” which is the feature directorial debut of “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, due out May 31. And yes, there will be more “#1 Happy Family USA.”

The show, a co-production of Amazon MGM Studios, A24 and Youssef’s Cairo Cowboy production company, was already picked up for two seasons on Amazon.

‘H’ for haram

Youssef’s “Ramy” is acclaimed for its representation.

But a “representation warning” precedes each episode of his animated series:

“Do not use this animated show as cultural representation for any of the following communities: Muslims. Arabs. People from New Jersey.”

Beneath the warning, there is a rating — “H” for haram (“Allah please forgive mistakes in this program”).

One of the less “politically correct” subplots of the show is Rumi’s infatuation with his teacher Mrs. Malcolm, voiced by Mandy Moore.

The show directly references Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, who had children and got married after first meeting when he was her second-grade student in the ’90s. There is an extended fantasy-nightmare sequence that imagines Rumi winning the heart of his teacher, who in real life is utterly obsessed with Michael Jordan.

To impress her in class, he gets a Chicago Bulls jersey, but it’s a knockoff, so it says “Balls.” (That’s what he wears for the rest of the show.)

Also, there probably haven’t been many animated series that have dedicated an episode to the Tanner test, or Tanner scale. The practice involves school staff checking students’ genitals to assess their physical development — for Rumi, it’s the only way he can get on the basketball team.

When he has trouble with kids rejecting his Muslim identity at school, Hussein tells him to lean into his Egyptian heritage.

That only further draws the ire of his classmates, who become suspicious of the pyramids. Meanwhile, Rumi’s Uncle Ahmed (Paul Elia) has been arrested for no apparent reason at all — law enforcement thinks he has terrorist “vibes,” meaning he could end up in Guantánamo Bay.

A 9/11 truther on staff at Rumi’s school, who is invested in conspiracy theories and surveillance, becomes an unlikely ally.

The middle school student provides the primary window into his family — which includes a talking lamb named Lamby — but his sister has her own narrative.

Mona’s plan to come out as gay to her family on Sept. 11 is quickly thwarted.

But she has other plans. She’s poised to soar up the cousin leaderboard because she’s running for class president at Gabagool High School.

Mona wants to be elected so she can get into Harvard. It’s just the beginning of her political ambitions: she sees herself as a U.S. senator, and, eventually, president.

Sharia, played by comedian Salma Hindy, tells her daughter that no one with the name Hussein can become president.

But Rumi wonders: What if it was their middle name?

This being a 2001-set show, there is no actual mention of President Barack Hussein Obama, but hearing that line, you can almost hear his slow clap in the distance.

It’s just one example of the show’s quick-witted comedy that skewers Islamophobia, racism and post-9/11 profiling.

In the same episode, Rumi’s mother, who loathes being haunted by her recently deceased father (Azhar Usman) — a fan of casual misogyny — goes to a Princess Diana expo. Accompanying her is her employer, a dentist voiced by Oscar winner Kieran Culkin who befriends her and inexplicably starts wearing a hijab.

Sharia, a longtime Lady Di fan, shares a memorable observation about her fave.

“Diana meant so much to the women across the Arab world,” she says. “She was just like us — an arranged marriage, tough in-laws, pressure to keep the family’s honor, the world criticizing her body, her devotion to her children despite the injustices, and then she loved Dodi ... a love that would end colonialism! Diana was the white world’s first Arab woman."

Sharia owns various Diana mugs, including one picturing her with Egyptian boyfriend Dodi Fayed — how else, she asks, will she solve her “murder”?

“So much of the Arab world is obsessed with Princess Diana,” Youssef says. “I think so much of the world, to this day is still obsessed with Princess Diana. And even while we were making the show, I was in Egypt, and I was at an aunt’s house, and I opened up a cabinet to get a mug, and there were four different Princess Diana mugs ... It’s kind of like in the way that we’re all really obsessed with podcasts about true crime or whatever. I do think that she was kind of one of the initial obsessions of people over the last couple decades ... She’s very loved by Egypt to this day."

Throwback treasures and Emmy-worthy songs

One of the joys of Youssef’s show is how gleefully it approaches 2000s pop culture.

The series is sure to get laughs and knowing nods from millennials and xennials.

Consider the woes of waiting *forever* to burn a mix CD, then getting an illegal download warning because of all the tracks you secured from a file-sharing service. Rumi is put on notice!

The ’90s and 2000s also saw the rise of internet abbreviations like “TTYL” and “TTFN.” Rumi’s friend Garrett (Whitmer Thomas) takes this to extremes, speaking in sentence-long initialisms that would seem to defeat the purpose.

Rumi even chats with then-President George W. Bush using AOL Instant Messenger — AIM to anyone with an account in the aughts.

“I think the period nostalgia just makes the show really rich and fun, and kind of gives it a cool backdrop,” Youssef says. “It becomes one of those things that you can kind of really get to lean into animation. I think if you wanted to shoot a live-action movie and have it feel like it happened 25 years ago, there’s so much you have to do to streets and and find all these old objects and whatever. And here you can just kind of draw whatever you wanna draw.”

This is also a show where Youssef gets to spread his wings musically, singing as both of his characters.

There seems to be plenty of Emmy potential in the resulting songs.

Hussein gets vulnerable, exposing the weariness behind his resolve in tunes like “Money for the Meat,” about his street cart hustle.

Rumi lets loose in a rap homage to Eminem‘s “Stan” as he starts bleaching his hair. Failing to fit in, he turns to singing dark metal and embracing faux-Satanism in a ploy to switch schools.

The radio-ready song “Spies in the Mosque” arrives as Hussein suspects authorities are watching his family’s place of worship (they are).

“It came up organically, really,” Youssef says of the show’s songs. “I was recording at a music studio, just doing VO (voiceover), and I was surrounded by guitars. And, you know, the Jersey emo scene we grew up in, we all kind of picked up a guitar and knew a bit. And so it was kind of fun to grab this and kind of say ‘Well, what would it sound like if this character made some music?’”

From there, Youssef came up with “Money for the Meat” and starting working on the show’s “#1 Happy Family USA” theme, as performed by Hussein.

“I’ve got an acoustic guitar at my house, and I just started demoing all these tracks, and then I built them out with with our composer, Moez Dawad, who composed the entire show between Cairo and Alexandria,” he says. “And we just kind of made this album and slotted these really great tracks into the show. It speaks to how expansive this animation format can be.”

“#1 Happy Family USA” premieres April 17 on Amazon Prime Video.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.