Mona Chalabi on Working with Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady

On June 5, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for some of the most impressive and engaging work of this TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind television well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Ahead, “#1 Happy Family USA” executive producer and creative director Mona Chalabi tells IndieWire about her first foray into television under the wing of Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady, winners of this year’s Spark Award for animation.

As told to Proma Khosla. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ramy Youssef DMed me on Instagram and just said, “I’m working on a project. Is it OK if I give you a call and tell you about it?” I didn’t know him before this. We had a very quick five minute call, and he just told me the broad outlines of the show — this is where it’s based, this is when it’s based, and this is the family — and I was just fully sold.

They sent me the pages they had written up and the outline of the pilot, and it was really exciting because I could already see the world of the show in their writing. I did a call with him and A24 and I actually wasn’t even planning on pitching to use my illustrations for the show; what I was pitching them was, “Here are visual references that I think could be a good fit based on everything that we’ve discussed.”

The day after the call with A24, I sent a bunch of references from illustrators whose work I liked, and then immediately they were like, “Great, you’re an executive producer on the show and you’re the creative director.” I had some sense that that was a big deal for me, but I didn’t fully grasp the enormous generosity that they had extended to me until we were quite deep into the making of it.

Relatively early on — and again, this was so generous of them — they let me join the writers room. I didn’t have any scripted writing experience, and made the case that it would help me to better design the world of the show. I was kind of just saying that because I wanted to get in there, but in retrospect, that really was true. I would draw while I was in the writers room, making pictures about the characters — talking about how fearless Grandma is, for example, that meant I was adjusting the posture of that character. It was actually really helpful.

Pam was in the writers room, so I really got to watch her do her thing, which is just absolutely incredible. I knew that “South Park” is such a legendary show. I can see why Pam was such a big part of it. She was just effortless in the room at navigating the kind of minutiae of one particular plot point with the overall arc of the entire season. It was also amazing to have her there because I would constantly be sharing these rough drafts of the designs. Because she’d worked on “South Park,” she just had this insight into what would work and what wouldn’t.

My style is almost childlike, but the scale of it is pretty true — like the proportions of a head and a body. And Pam kept on saying “No, no. In animation, you need to make the head way bigger so you can see the characters’ expressions.” That was really difficult for me, but we were all on the same page. It sounds weird, but we didn’t want it to feel too cartoonish in a silly kind of way. The more grounded the illustrations are, the more you can get really, really big with the plot points.

Anyway, she was right. She was right about pretty much everything. The heads needed to be bigger.

I feel like animation is the most beautiful and powerful way to learn about making anything that’s scripted, because it just felt like the whole world was within our reach. If you wanted to go back and reconsider a section of a script weeks and weeks afterwards, that was still doable because the actor would be in the voice booth and get you them to do a few pickup lines and see what works. There was this ability to infinitely revise — which is quite dangerous in some ways, because it’s really hard to put the project down — but I was able to see that ability to go back and to refine and hone again and again and again. Especially with Ramy. Ramy is such a perfectionist, and it’s exhausting and utterly inspiring to be around. It was an incredible experience.

There was a lot of patience. I am, by nature, a really impatient person, and I think I’m quite eager to please. It’s tough when the first illustrations that you send aren’t quite working, the second, the third. For me, in my mind, that means it’s a colossal failure, where having their experience, they were able to say, “No, no. Character design for animation can take easily a year, so I don’t know why on Earth you think you’re going to nail this in a couple of weeks.” It was very comforting to hear. They were so good at always being able to pluck out at least one thing that was working.

I remember this turning point: the first character that actually formed the basis for the rest of the character designs was the sister in the show — who weirdly is called Mona, but has nothing to do with me — and they were like, “There’s something in this illustration that you’ve done that feels right. Just go there. Keep on doing more of that.” It was amazing.

They deserve this award. It’s just one of those nice things, isn’t it? Where the universe is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s just nice to see people getting what they deserve, always. I think it’s another real testament to who both of them are that they’ve both had such long standing relationships with collaborators, and I really hope to include myself in that. I hope to work with both of them for a very, very long time. I mean that.

“#1 Happy Family USA” is now streaming on Prime Video.