12 SOUTH ASIAN & ARAB-LED MOVIES AND SHOWS I NEED MORE PEOPLE TO WATCH
Anyone who watched Never Have I Ever already knows Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is very good at playing a young woman who throws herself headfirst into a situation and figures out the consequences somewhere around step seven. Now she’s taking that energy to Best of the Best, an upcoming dance comedy starring Ramakrishnan alongside Priyanka Kedia and Hasan Minhaj.
Dropping September 18, the film follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali, who join UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team and quickly discover that collegiate dance is apparently less Bring It On bonding montage and more blood sport with better costumes. Their goal is a U.S. championship. The path there is, naturally, chaotic. It's exactly the kind of premise that sent me down a rabbit hole looking for more South Asian and Arab-led movies and shows with similar soul feels I could put more people onto.
And, at the risk of congratulating myself too early, I think I found a few. These picks have criminally incompetent brothers, painfully awkward musicians, decades-long love stories, very bad spiritual decisions and enough family drama to keep things interesting. Basically, if you’ve just inhaled Best of the Best and you're looking for something fun to watch next, start here.
Bait (2026-)
Stream on:
Shah Latif is a struggling British-Pakistani actor whose career suddenly explodes when he lands an audition for James Bond. Which sounds great until the possibility of a brown Bond turns him into a national conversation and sends his already-fragile life completely off the rails. Riz Ahmed turns the whole thing into a funny, strange satire about fame, representation and what happens when your dream becomes a little bit of a curse.
Deli Boys (2025-2026)
Stream on: Hulu/Disney+
Mir and Raj are two spoiled Pakistani-American brothers who discover, after their father dies, that the family convenience-store business had a rather significant side hustle: organized crime. Now they have to keep the empire running despite having approximately zero qualifications for the job. It’s fast, deeply unserious, and blessed with Poorna Jagannathan as the terrifying auntie you absolutely do not want to disappoint.
Layla (2024)
Stream on: Hulu/Disney+
Layla is a British-Palestinian drag queen who falls hard for Max, a buttoned-up marketing executive who seems to belong to an entirely different world. The romance is intoxicating until Layla starts quietly editing themself to make the relationship easier to maintain. Sexy, messy and occasionally uncomfortable, it's exactly what a good romance should be.
Ms. Marvel Miniseries (2022)
Stream on: Disney+
Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American teenager from Jersey City who writes Avengers fanfic, worships Captain Marvel and is generally much more comfortable imagining herself as a superhero than being herself. Then she actually gets powers. The MCU machinery occasionally gets in the way, but Iman Vellani is so charming that Kamala remains one of Marvel’s easiest heroes to root for.
A Nice Indian Boy (2024)
Stream on: Hulu/Disney+
Naveen is a shy Indian-American doctor who finally finds a man he wants to bring home to his family. The complication: Jay is white, was adopted by Indian parents and somehow knows more about Naveen’s Bollywood-romance fantasies than Naveen would prefer. It’s a genuinely sweet gay rom-com with enough family mess to keep all that sweetness from giving you a toothache.
Stream on: Netflix
Emma and Dexter meet on graduation night, then spend the next two decades repeatedly finding, losing and almost choosing each other. Ambika Mod's Emma is prickly, funny and painfully easy to love, which is important because this show intends to put your emotional stability through several rounds of unnecessary testing. Watch if yearning is one of your preferred forms of self-harm.
Polite Society (2023)
Stream on: Peacock
Ria wants to be a stuntwoman. Her older sister wants to marry a suspiciously perfect man. Ria responds to this news like any reasonable younger sister would: by assembling her friends, investigating the groom’s family and planning a full-scale wedding heist. Martial arts, sister drama and snippy aunties in formalwear never looked this good.
Ramy (2019-2022)
Stream on: Hulu/Disney+
Ramy wants to be a good Muslim. He also wants sex, approval, purpose and approximately twelve other things that regularly interfere with being a good Muslim. The result is a painfully funny portrait of an Egyptian-American man whose spiritual journey would probably be going much better if he could stop making everything worse.
Stream on: Hulu/Disney+
Uma arrives in Mumbai for an arranged marriage and discovers almost immediately that she's spectacularly unsuited to domestic bliss. Then boredom turns into nocturnal wandering, strange appetites and increasingly feral behavior. Sister Midnight is deadpan, macabre and gloriously weird— the kind of movie where explaining too much would only ruin the fun.
Sort Of (2021-2023)
Stream on: HBO Max
Sabi is a genderfluid Pakistani-Canadian millennial working as a bartender and nanny while trying to figure out whether it might be time to blow up their entire life. Instead, life gets there first. Sort Of is funny, tender and refreshingly uninterested in giving Sabi a neat little identity journey when being a person is already complicated enough.
We Are Lady Parts (2021-2024)
Stream on: Peacock
Amina is a painfully awkward Ph.D. student who somehow finds herself recruited as the lead guitarist for Lady Parts, an all-Muslim women’s punk band. What follows is music, friendship, terrible dating decisions, creative ambition and some of the funniest women on TV right now. The whole thing is loud, warm, chaotic and ridiculously easy to love.
Never Have I Ever (2020-2023)
Stream on: Netflix
No list like this would be complete without Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever, a near perfect teen TV rom-com I'd put on the same level of enjoyment as To All the Boys I've Loved Before. It follows Devi Vishwakumar. Devi would like a boyfriend, admission to Princeton and perhaps five consecutive minutes in which she does not make her own life dramatically worse. Unfortunately, she's a grieving, horny, wildly competitive teenager, so none of that goes smoothly. Devi's brilliant, selfish, hilarious, exhausting and occasionally dead wrong but so fun to watch.
If Best of the Best sends you spiraling into the same rabbit hole it sent me down, at least now you’ll know where to go next.
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