The Golden Globe-winning comedy’s ambitious second season offers a masterclass in avoiding personal responsibility masked as moral improvement.

The first season was a boon for critics – an underrepresented perspective, daring, underseen, worthy of a major Golden Globe win – but its second season, which premiered last week, lifts it to a must-see: an ambitious, contradictory and refractive exploration of one man’s sisyphean trek toward meaning and spirituality in a deeply profane, messy and sometimes wondrous world.

For its second season, Ramy recruits two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali to play a Sufi sheikh leading a mixed congregation at an adapted church picketed by Islamophobic locals.

Ramy’s enduring – at times, too enduring – passivity in the face of consequences defines the whole second season, which like the first contains several side-character capsules in which he disappears entirely (Hiam Abbass, as his brittle yet deeply sympathetic mother Maysa, once again delivers a standout turn).

The scene is a masterclass in flailing appeals to likability filling a bottomless hole of deferred personal responsibility; swaddled in a sheet as if an overgrown, diapered toddler, Ramy pleads before the sheikh for unearned forgiveness, for an explanation, for opportunity as “a place to grow from”.

To be clear, Ramy is a brilliant show for many reasons, especially the space devoted to its female and middle-aged characters; nor is the new season unimpeachable (see: a capsule episode for his sister Dena (May Calamawy), which does little to expand her character beyond the first season)

But perhaps the most potent insight in this second season is the lead’s amenable but pathological defiance of personal responsibility, his well-meaning and winsome brew of good intentions and self-obsession