Hulu's Ramy Delivers TV’s Most Evolved Take on Dick Pics

Hulu’s new series Ramy is can’t-miss television because of the many ways it enlivens a familiar concept. It’s another comedy about dating and the professional displacement of your twenties, all while reconciling your parents’ expectations and bad advice from your buddies. Except this time, it’s a series from a specific Muslim American lens and aims to dissect male bullshit rather than reinforce it.

Ramy Youssef plays the titular everybro as the series unpacks his coming of age with a socio-religous context that TV seldom addresses. He lives at home with his Egyptian-American parents, who just want him to get married. He takes advice from his buddies, puts up with his uncle’s anti-Jewish rhetoric to maintain a paycheck, and tries to reconcile it all with a moral compass. We’ve seen shades of what Ramy is going for in Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, but that show’s more conceptual focus lacked the toughness and sober honesty at play in this series.

Additionally, unlike the shows it otherwise seems similar to, Ramy is determined to call out male ego and all of its intersectional layers. Where other shows would revel in the bad male behavior of sex and youth, this series offers us a character who observes it from the outside while struggling with how much he should participate. In this way, Ramy’s look at straight male sexuality is like the anti-Entourage, the television poster child for supporting the gross behavior of horny men.

Take the show’s hilarious debate on the intricacies of when to send a dick pic from its third episode, “A Black Spot on the Heart.” Ramy’s buddies Mo (Mohammed Amer) and Ahmed (Dave Merheje) coach their supposedly less savvy friend on the first steps with a new romantic prospect. Mo equates sending an earlier unsolicited dick pic to “pictures of food on a menu,” a service that allows a girl to decide whether to proceed. This warped view of consent makes Ahmed muse if “it’s rapey not to send a dick”. You can safely imagine Turtle and Drama looking on disdainfully at their feigned consideration of the woman on the receiving end, if not outright spiteful of it.

Ramy, however, is uncomfortable with the whole creepy proposition and hesitant to screw up the connection he made with this new romantic prospect. Instead of a show that intends us to laugh along with the male perspective of acceptable sexual behavior, it’s a satire on the self-serving male rationalization behind it. And the joke only works because the show’s perspective is more tuned in to toxic masculinity than even its protagonist.

Later, Ramy’s learning curve continues after the party date with said girl goes south. The blow to his confidence has him re-thinking his dick-pic strategy, though Mo and Ahmed vehemently proclaim the time has past. For Ramy, the confusing double standard is confounding, but for us, these supposed rules are another funny stab into the gut of the kind of mentality the show is skewering.

There is also the importance of Ramy’s religion getting twisted up in his unformed sense of self. He attempts to be pious but also tries to live his religious practice out in the world as quietly as possible, almost apologizing when it butts up against what is cool or convenient. His first reality check comes early in the first episode when he is dumped not for being a practicing Muslim, but for being so secretive about it. To him, this is all about being the good guy to all parties, accommodating to the point of trying to be several people that he is not.

Part of the show’s genius lies in how Ramy’s attempts to be a good guy often unlock his myopias, like how his failed sexual encounter with his first arranged date reveals the very narrow sexual range he allows himself to view Muslim women. Or when the care he shows for his disabled friend Steve (Steve Way) devolves into prodding Steve’s mother about his eventual death under the guise of sensitivity. It’s not always cringe humor, but in the early episodes we are seldom laughing with Ramy in his mistakes.

Ramy chases an idea of himself, just as men of his age seek to achieve a male ideal. Luckily we finally have a show that asks its manchild why he is running toward something and what is he running from.

Chris Feil is a freelancer writer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His previous work can be found at Vulture, Vice, Paste, and The Film Experience. Follow him @chrisvfeil on Twitter.