New TV shows don’t earn a perfect critics’ score right out of the gate all that often, so when they do — as in the case of Prime Video’s heartwarming new sitcom #1 Happy Family USA — it’s worth taking note. Created by Ramy Youssef and former South Park writer Pam Brady, this new animated series (produced by A24) is making waves for all the right reasons, including the fact that it arrived on Amazon’s streamer today with a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Set in the early 2000s, the series follows the Arab-American Hussein family as they chase their version of the American Dream — with plenty of sitcom-worthy hijinks, culture clashes, and tender moments along the way. The show’s star-studded voice cast also includes Youssef, Alia Shawkat, Mandy Moore, Timothy Olyphant, and Kieran Culkin, with Youssef and Brady serving as co-showrunners for the series.
For Youssef, an Egyptian-American actor, comedian, director, producer, and screenwriter, the show is part memoir, part coming-of-age comedy, and part love letter to immigrant families just trying to figure it all out. Think The Wonder Years, but with AOL chat rooms, overprotective dads, and a lot more hummus.
The Husseins, Prime Video explains, are “the most patriotic, most peaceful, and most definitely-not-suspicious Muslim family in post-9/11 ‘Amreeka.’ With satire and absurdity, [the show] redefines finding humor in hardship as they navigate the early 2000s under the watchful eyes of their terrified neighbors.”
What makes #1 Happy Family USA stand out isn’t just its specificity; it’s the way it taps into universal themes like identity, assimilation, and generational tension with both humor and heart. The show walks a beautiful tightrope, managing to be laugh-out-loud funny one moment and surprisingly poignant the next. The early-2000s setting is also a rich source of nostalgia, filled with nods to flip phones, dial-up tones, and the quiet undercurrent of post-9/11 tension that lingers in the family’s everyday life.
The New York Times praises the show as a bittersweet coming-of-age sitcom, “with shades of Big Mouth and Everybody Hates Chris, and half brutal satire about Islamophobia in the early 2000s. It encourages viewers to find humor and humanity in outlandish scenarios stemming from what was a dark period for many American families.”
