The ‘Mo’ Production Design Took All the Right Details Across Houston and Around the World

You know you’re up to something special when your job involves replicating the kind of chocolate that “The Shawshank Redemption” used to create the mud that Andy Dufresne breaks through to freedom. But that is exactly what production designer Carmen Navis needed to do to make Mo Najjar’s (Mo Amer) own escape from an immigration detention facility — in a dream sequence, anyway — work as such a hilarious, heightened, poignant part of “Mo” Season 2. 

The dream sequences throughout the final season of the Netflix comedy use cinematic signifiers and genre conceits to help tell the story of the big emotions that Mo’s feeling as he goes from being stranded in Mexico City to being deported but monitored in America to finally getting legal status and being able to visit his extended family in the West Bank. For every twist and turn of the story, Navis and her team researched the right details behind the environments they were creating; with that grounding, even high comedy moments have a reality to them. 

“ My art director [Zedrick Hamblin DiMenno] would take my deck and basically dissect it and find the source material and go deeper into what we were doing. So for ‘Shawshank,’ we were quite method. He looked up the recipes for how the ‘Shawshank’ scenic team designed the [escape sequence], which was basically chocolate, sawdust, and a few special ingredients, which we replicated,” Navis said. “This is Mo finally reaching the U.S., and [Amer] wanted to show that there was going to be some symbolism and this freedom, even though he’s still stateless.” 

The dream sequences allow for design swings with symbolism both subtle and overt — a Native American tent that Mo approaches in Episode 7 has the same Tatreez pattern as the olive oil bottles his family is trying to sell, for instance. But Navis also had the challenge of portraying some very different communities — including most of Mo’s sojourn in Mexico City — mostly on location in Houston. 

The key to differentiating different neighborhoods? “I think the palette is the most important [part] of the language of the world we’re creating. For Mexico City, especially, it’s really about infusing it with these vibrant pinks and greens and more tertiary, muted, but still popping tones,” Navis said. 

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Getting the right details to pop is what helps sell a space, whether it’s the graphics on the products scattered around Mo’s broom-closet-sized apartment in Mexico City or the little Nigerian touches across Nick (Tobe Nwigwe) and Toya’s (Martica Nwigwe) new home, or the clever furniture cutouts where Hamid (Moayad Alnefaie) hides guns to protect his beloved Dallas (Shasta Brooke). 

“You need to choose these moments — how can we get this right in a quick turnaround? How do you create this world and make it believable? What are the key factors that are going to give us this feeling of where Mo is,” Navis said. 

Sometimes, that feeling can be fun and hyperbolic, as when Navis and her set decoration team decided on the day to take all the dolls scattered around Hamid and Dallas’ house and pile them into the mother-in-law’s room Mo attempts to stay in. “ I think that’s the beauty of designing comedy, right? There is not just the visual language of what we’re creating, but can we make it funnier with what we’re doing? Those little moments were important,” Navis said. 

But those little moments can pack an emotional punch, too, and it was on Navis and her team to get them just as right. The modular way that Sameer’s (Omar Elba) boxes have taken over Mo’s bedroom, pushing him out of the comfort that his brother and his mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), have built now they have refugee status echoes one of the biggest design challenges that Navis and her team had: the detention center where Mo is held after crossing back into the US. 

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It took rigorous research to get the details of that facility right, given how difficult it is to find references in the public domain. Navis, DiMenno, set decoration lead Michelle Howe, and leadman Sam Howeth all worked together to research and scavenge the right materials, turning a warehouse into a holding center with hand-cut scavenged metal siding and fencing to create the holding pens where Mo ends up. 

“Everything that we sourced, from the porta-potties to the mailboxes on the walls, [they] were exactly as it was in the references,” Navis said. “We mounted the security monitors and surveillance cameras — [Howeth] had gotten 400 pounds of clothing from a Salvation Army that we were going to donate back with some money for the rental, but we had to be really crafty. My props team got everything packaged and zipped up the way that you’re given these stamped-out materials.” 

For Navis, creating the CBP facility was a peak moment in Season 2, the kind of challenge where the production design team is under pressure to get it right and has to move quickly — even for a TV comedy. “There was not any time for walkthroughs. We were moving things moments before camera because we knew that the work our DP [Gevorg Gev Juguryan] was doing and [director Slick Naim] and Mo were going to be figuring out how they were going to be playing this,” Navis said. “Everything was really heightened — heightened emotions and very specific.” 

Navis and her team used specific characters and colors to achieve the right vibes of each part of Houston we see, too. “The energy of Alief, where Mo’s from, has this real texture and approachable mise-en-scene, which I found really enticing for a designer like me who’s often most interested in creating stylizations or pushing the boundaries with color,” Navis said. 

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There’s a warmth and a patina to Alief that Navis wanted to stress as a home base, but also some genuine cowboy, Southwest aesthetic that was part of the fun of other environments Mo ends up in. And for that, the production design team ended up roping in some unexpected help. 

For the rodeo barbecue, Navis scouted the actual Houston rodeo and ended up connecting with some of the pit masters. The iconic Goody Girls Cooking Team ended up donating a lot of their signage to give the food tents and dance floor a truly local flavor; the team that actually won the rodeo barbecue ended up appearing on camera as Guy’s (Simon Rex) cooking team. 

“We built [the rodeo] with a very small team, and had this whole facade to create a world because we shot after the [real] rodeo was gone,” Navis said. “That was an intense way to begin the show but that’s where we started and when I could see what my team could do in that very short amount of time, I knew that basically we could do anything.”

“Mo” is available to stream on Netflix.