Watching the first two series of Ramy a few years ago I perpetrated a cliché: ‘scandalised laughter’. During my laughter—often and loud—I thought, Wow, they really went there, or How are they getting away with this? Most of all I thought: At last—someone’s doing it. Someone’s doing a TV comedy about Muslims that’s smart, frank, and not cramped either by bad caricatures or good taste.

That someone is Ramy Youssef, and his team of simpatico-writers and -stars. In their show, a young Egyptian American called Ramy careens between the weight of his Islamic faith and the material payoffs of living in the West. The way the show dramatises this careening is audacious but (or so) believable. The pilot episode featured a young Muslim woman on a date that ended in a choking yet not the sort concern trolls might expect; while in the second series, Ramy learnt the mind-boggling yet halal solution of a wealthy Emirati to try get himself off Mia Khalifa porn. As Youssef explained to Vulture, ‘A lot of immigrant stories on TV and film, I feel like I’m watching someone upgrade into a white lifestyle. And this show is a wrestling match of wanting to be in both.’

Everyone in Ramy is wrestling, with the results tragic as much as comic. Youssef has the fuzzy boyishness of a brown Reece Shearsmith; it’s how (for the most part) Ramy gets away with both his semi-slacker life and cack-handed grabs at spirituality. Amr Waked plays his dad Farouk. For a dad to bristle at his shiftless son is standard sitcom fare—it’s funnier, and realer, when he bristles more at his son for swinging too much the other way in his hero-worship of a Sufi sheikh (a forbidding Mahershala Ali). Farouk’s wife, Maysa, is played by Hiam Abbass, given so much more to shine with than she ever was in Succession: an illegal immigrant who secretly becomes a Lyft driver in an episode that plays like one of those melancholy masterpieces of Iranian cinema. Her brother, Uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli) is the greatest comedy asshole since The Big Lebowski’s Walter, and who, like Walter, has a nub of loneliness hidden inside. And playing Ramy’s sister Dena is May Calamawy, who I mention here to mirror how the show struggles to ensure she’s not just an afterthought.

Its tone (which you can call dramedy, but do we really need such a stupid word? Aren’t the best stories funny and dramatic?), its short story-like episodes, and the young polymath talent behind them might remind you of Donald Glover, and it’s easy to think of Ramy as Atlanta for New Jersey Arabs. But Atlanta is about being millennial, gifted, and black; Ramy more wears the influence of neighbouring New York schmuck-fests Louie and Girls. Like Louie it has a knack for everyday surrealism, and Rube Goldberg machine plots of urban error and horror—not to mention a fixation on sex; Ramy’s crew has a token white guy, show-stealer Steve (Steve Way), whose muscular dystrophy once helped him connect with his Muslim classmate isolated after 9/11, a friendship which since has become a kind of sexual caddying. And like Girls, its characters are self-fascinated, chaotic, and sometimes plain gross.

We expect now these kinds of shows to have flawed characters—which often just means they’re online too much or have impostor syndrome or other self-destructive habits. Ramy is plain destructive. A friend once told me: when people say they want more representation what they too often mean is positive representation. Ramy is more than a show about ethnic people leading sympathetically messy lives—wait, what? He sleeps around and prays?! Ramy’s try-hard spirituality leads to actual bodies in hospitals and marriages trashed. His friends, meanwhile, exist as other poles, other possibilities for modern Arab Americans: nervously well-behaved doctor Ahmed (Dave Meherje), epic shawarma guy Mo (Mohamed Amer). Yet it’s these friends who quit a lairy bachelor party only to bliss out in their hotel room on Oculus headsets over a VR pilgrimage to Mecca. No wonder the mooted title for the show was Bad Muslims.

Stories about immigrants can be fear-allaying for the host nation; or they wear their difference so proudly that entrance to outsiders comes on strict tourist visa. Under the old dispensation, these stories were either for you, or, more likely, not for you. (It’s more likely these days to see ‘for you’ as the chipper term of address used by one of your streaming algorithms.) So are you Muslim enough to get it, then? Are you Egyptian Muslim? Are you a first-generation Egyptian Muslim American? Wait, and from New Jersey?

As well as the show having, for the sociopolitically anxious, 24-carat authenticity, it’s stylish, sexy—plus the episodes are under 30 minutes. So why is the show not more well-known this side of the Atlantic? Is its deep, detailed specificity off-putting? (Maybe it’s a little too hard to find: series one of the show was on All4, series two could be rented via the Starz app on Amazon Prime, but series three, just released on Hulu stateside, still has no UK address. Imagine a novel trilogy where the first part you could buy at WH Smiths, while the second was only on Kindle, and the third you had to get from a library in Dungeness.)

But take for example an early joke in the show: a man at a Ramadan iftar meal tries to enter a conversation with his impeccable salaam only to get made as an FBI narc by Mo and told to fuck off. Part of the effectiveness of this joke is how spot-on a detail it is to twenty-first-century Muslims in the West, what with its Prevent stooges and Quilliam cucks. Yet comedy can straddle both recognition and seeing afresh, what in Russian formalism they call the familiar versus the estranged, or in stand-up comedy, ‘Don’t you just hate it when…?’ versus ‘Isn’t it weird how…?’ Ramy’s specificity is affirming for some and revealing for others, and those sides don’t split on ethnic lines. The best art is never for someone or anyone but no one. Even the most entertaining, popular, financially successful art is great primarily because it kept to its own logic, its own formal vision; it didn’t tweak itself, pander, fake it just to please.

Does Ramy? Some of the show’s wobbles are excusable feet-finding (episode one was called ‘Between the Toes’). When Ramy rescues a dog from a car it’s covered in shit but a little later he’s letting it into his home. (It’s this kind of oversight that reinforces Muslims’ anti-dog prejudice.) If anything the show’s wobbles aren’t to do with these flubs or its comic audacity but its very occasional gingerliness. And sadly, these wobbles are often in the storylines of Dena, played convincingly with equal parts angry pluck and anxious longing by the talented Calamawy.

What room can a TV show make for the sister of the character it’s named after? Dena’s episodes can be among the show’s best, the POV-switch to her subtly transposing everyone’s characterisations, so that Ramy becomes the background character in her life: an overgrown brat. (Kvetching once about his dad, Ramy says, ‘He treated me like I was Dena or something.’)

But other episodes have shaky concepts that do an injustice to Calamawy’s talent. Most troubling, though not in the way you’d expect, is an episode with a trans woman (Maybe Burke), which acquits well on that issue. Burke is a Lyft customer good-naturedly but nosily quizzed by Maysa when she just wanted to ride in peace. A negative Lyft review alarms Maysa into a panicked tracking down of her fare, which ends with the fare’s boyfriend calling the cops. But so determined was the show here to get a trans character and storyline right, they missed a jarring inconsistency. Why would right-on Dena be so blasé about her illegal immigrant mom having the cops sicced on her, especially mid-Trump? In blindspots like this, the show means too well.

What’s distinguished Ramy so far is not how right-on it is, but how ‘wrong’ it’s willing to be. There are moments in the show—say, when a wank-curious schoolboy Ramy gets schooled on the grievances of the Global South by a certain ghost of Islamic past—that I was certain would provoke the same reaction as Philip Roth’s writer alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, who’s scolded by his offended brother, ‘To you everything is… exposable!… everything is grist to your fun-machine.’ A sanctimonious friend of their father even quizzes Zuckerman, ‘Aside from the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do you think this… will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the Jewish people?’

Ramy hasn’t been cowed by elders or spokespeople from exposing embarrassing Islam-adjacent topics you’re not meant to discuss with outsiders: Evil Eye superstitions, cousin relationships, Sufism as the Muslim version of ‘I’m not religious, I’m more a spiritual person,’—last refuge of the backslider. And aside from financial gain, the benefit of Ramy is the potential to define and elevate the culture from which it’s arisen.

And yet when a show is as good as Ramy there’s a growing suspense external to it. Will it make it to the end of the tightrope, below which yawns boredom, fall-offs in quality, copping out? Will it stay this good? Not as long as the new series of the show keeps to its logic, its vision of showing us all the weird, moving, embarrassing and humanly ugly facets of being a Muslim in the West. Ramy, there’s no such thing as too far when your heart is true. Ramy, set yourself free.