# Masameer
**Masameer** (مسامير, translated as "nails") is a Saudi Arabian adult animated series that satirizes social issues in Saudi Arabia and the wider [Arab world](https://www.edgepedia.org/arab-world) through short stories about characters representing segments of society. It began as a web series on YouTube in 2011, was created by Faisal Alamer, Abdulaziz Al-Muzaini, and Malik Nejer, and later expanded into a theatrical feature film and the Netflix series *Masameer County*.[1](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/03/11/arab-cartoons-animations-ramy-youssef/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original run | YouTube web series, first aired January 3, 2011, last new episode March 21, 2019; 101 episodes in season 1 at an average runtime of 8 minutes[2](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer) |
| Creators | Faisal Alamer, Abdulaziz Al-Muzaini, and Malik Nejer; the title translates to "nails"[1](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/03/11/arab-cartoons-animations-ramy-youssef/) |
| Studio | Myrkott Animation Studio, Riyadh; Nejer described it as started on paper in January 2015, with the team working together since 2009[3](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html) |
| Feature film | *Masameer: The Movie* (2020), released in Saudi cinemas and distributed globally by Netflix[4](https://www.arabnews.pk/lifestyle/meet-saudi-animator-malik-nejer-the-man-behind-masameer-county-2269606) |
| Netflix series | *Masameer County*, premiered July 1, 2021; two seasons of 8 and 6 episodes, 20-minute runtime, status ended[5](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer-county) |
| Chart record | On July 7, 2021, *Masameer County* set a record for consecutive days at number one on Netflix's top 10 chart for TV shows in Saudi Arabia[6](https://agsi.org/analysis/the-rise-of-gulf-animation/) |
| Spin-off film | *Masameer Junior* (2025), 1h 11m, Netflix's first animated film from Saudi Arabia, released June 12, 2025 in the United States[7](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31408343/) |
| Reception | The original series holds an IMDb rating of 8.1/10 from about 962 votes, with a TV-MA age rating[8](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6298258/) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Masameer is not a serialized story with one arc. It is an anthology: each episode is a self-contained short, usually a few minutes long, built around Bandar, Saltooh, and their friend, three young Saudi men whose names and designs imply segments of Saudi society. The title itself, Masameer, is the plural of a word for a small nail or pin, the kind of trivial object the show treats with cosmic seriousness. Around the trio rotates a cast of grotesques, anthropomorphic animals, and talking objects, including a dog that speaks and a bespectacled donkey working as a psychiatrist. Every episode takes one ordinary Saudi preoccupation, a trip for ice cream, a pimple, a book, an elevator pitch, and pushes it until it snaps into horror or absurdity.
The episode people cite first is the season-one opener, "Ice Cream." Bandar, a wealthy young man who has been sheltered his entire life, wants one thing: ice cream. He decides to venture out alone for the first time to get it, and his naïve journey derails at every turn, eventually depositing him at a prostitute's house, a portrayal so unusual for Saudi media that scholars have flagged it as possibly the first of its kind on screen in the kingdom. The episode's punchline is its most infamous image: Bandar, in pursuit of a frozen dessert, ends up joining the Islamic State. The joke is not that he is an extremist but that he is so dim and so coddled that a terrorist recruitment pitch simply sounds like a way to get what he wants.
That logic scales up in "Genood Al Khorafa" (Soldiers of the Fantasy), from 2015, the standout episode of the middle years. The three main characters start a project they hope will finally make them bourgeois, respectable men of taste and money. Instead, their modest ambitions attract the attention of the Islamic State, and the fantasy of middle-class comfort collides head-on with the real fantasy of the jihadists. The episode does not lecture about radicalization; it simply shows three fools climbing the social ladder and finding militants on the rung above.
Other episodes became shorthand among fans. "Washingtonia" smuggles BDSM references into a story about the plant of the same name. "Pimple" gives Saltooh a single blemish and lets the attempt to remove it swallow his life. "Latrine of Secrets" satirizes tribalism, the sacred cow of Saudi social identity, by routing it through exactly the kind of place its title suggests. "Elevator Pitch" compresses infidelity, suicide, and faux spirituality into one ride. In one of the show's most pointed shorts, a bookstore owner searches for a copy of Nawal el-Saadawi's banned 1972 book Woman and Sex, and his quest for a forbidden book ends in prison time, vandalism, and murder, a miniature tragedy about what censorship actually costs.
**The episode fans call the greatest is "Clearance," which confronts censorship head on.** The short dramatizes the machinery of the censor itself, the office, the red pen, the reflex to cut, and turns it into comedy so direct that viewers treated it as the series' thesis statement. Masameer existed only because YouTube had no censor, and "Clearance" shows on screen what a censor does to the things he touches. It is the episode most often named when Saudis explain why the show mattered, because the show's entire existence, free, online, unapproved, was the argument "Clearance" makes in miniature.
Across the run, the shorts keep the same engine: an everyday want, a social taboo, and a chain of escalation that ends somewhere nobody could have predicted at minute one. The trio's failures are never punished with meaning; they are punished with consequences, prison, violence, ruin, delivered deadpan.
### Characters
Bandar is the wealthy one, sheltered and pampered, a young Saudi man who has never had to navigate the world his money supposedly protects him from. His solo quest in "Ice Cream" defines him: helpless outside his bubble, and catastrophically suggestible.
Saltooh, whose name translates roughly as "trivial male" or "someone poor with nothing in hand," is drawn with a large bent nose and voiced with a squeak. Scholars of the series read him as the naive young Saudi male who is a victim of his situations rather than the instigator of them; in "Pimple," a single blemish is enough to destroy him.
The third member of the trio completes the ensemble as the show's ordinary man, the straight line the other two bend. Around them move the anthology's grotesques: the talking dog, the donkey psychiatrist, the bureaucrats and zealots and self-help gurus who populate each short. None of the characters grow, because none of them need to; they are masks for segments of Saudi and Arab society, reset for each new episode.
### Interpretations and controversies
The show's humor is deliberately boundary-pushing, touching extremism, prostitution, tribalism, infidelity, and censorship, subjects that simply did not appear in Saudi media of the time. Critics and scholars note that the series keeps its satire strictly apolitical: national leaders are never discussed and nobody in particular is blamed for society's problems, a choice that widened its audience and, some argue, blunted its edge. When the material later traveled to Netflix as Masameer County, a peer-reviewed reception study found that 70% of surveyed viewers were unsure whether the subtitles conveyed the intended cultural and social references, and 75% found them understandable but confusing in places, evidence of how rooted the humor is in Saudi Arabic, mixing classical fusha ([Modern Standard Arabic](https://www.edgepedia.org/modern-standard-arabic), the formal classical register) with colloquial dialect.
### Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations
The YouTube shorts were adapted into Masameer: The Movie (2020), produced in eight months on a tight budget with some work outsourced, and shown on 80 screens after Saudi cinemas reopened following a 35-year ban. The producer's company describes it as Saudi Arabia's highest-grossing box office hit to date. Its success led to a five-year deal with Netflix and a rebranded series, Masameer County, a Netflix Original that continues the world with the recurring disclaimer that its characters and events are fictional but based on reality.
## Origins
The series grew out of censorship. According to the cultural platform Ibraaz, the Saudi writer Faisal Al-Amer had his novel *Shaghab* (Riot, 2010) banned by the authorities in late 2010, initially mainly for its title in light of the Arab uprisings of the time. He then teamed up with his animator friend Malik Nejer to create the satirical animated series. Al-Amer had left his job writing for a local newspaper in Riyadh because of censorship problems, and Nejer wanted to make a cartoon series dealing with distinctly Saudi issues. Al-Amer incorporated sections of *Shaghab* into the episodes' scripts, which, cloaked in satirical cartoon form, reached a general audience. The creators chose the internet as the launch site, describing it as a place where "freedom runs wild, the censor sleeps".[9](https://archive.ibraaz.org/publications/77)
Nejer's own account matches this timeline. Before the series, he worked for the Saudi-owned MBC television channel creating short sketches for a comedy show, found that they went viral online, and decided to create a show for the internet. He quit his job at MBC, and the first episode reportedly reached 100,000 views in its first week.[3](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html) • [4](https://www.arabnews.pk/lifestyle/meet-saudi-animator-malik-nejer-the-man-behind-masameer-county-2269606)
**The studio.** Nejer and his partner Abdulaziz Almuzaini, previously a cartoonist for the *Al Watan* newspaper, founded Myrkott Animation Studio. Nejer told Cartoon Brew that the company started on paper in January 2015, though the team had worked together since 2009; *LIST* magazine dates the founding of Myrkott Animation Studio to 2014 and describes it as the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia.[3](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html) • [10](https://www.listmag.com/en/see-and-do/a-new-era-the-unlikely-journey-of-malik-nejer-and-abdulaziz-almuzaini-2157) The studio's stated aim went beyond a single show to creating a market for animation in Saudi Arabia.[3](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html)
## The YouTube series
The original *Masameer* ran on YouTube from January 2011 to March 2019, with TheTVDB listing 101 episodes in its main season plus specials, at an average runtime of 8 minutes.[2](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer) Streaming catalogs describe it as a web series that uses dark comedy and eccentric characters to offer a humorous view of the changes and cultural shifts in Saudi Arabia from 2011 to 2019.[11](https://flixpatrol.com/title/masameer-classics/) Each episode addresses, in a manner both jocose and analytical, a critical issue shaping everyday life in the kingdom.[12](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jammr_00043_1)
**Language and characters.** The characters speak in both the conversational Saudi dialect and fusha, the classical form of Arabic, reconnecting younger audiences to a traditional form of the language while addressing contemporary issues.[13](https://abdulnassergharem.com/uploads/GENERATION_catalogue-cover.pdf) Nejer has said the animation is designed mainly for Saudi and Arab rather than international audiences, since understanding it requires cultural background knowledge of how Saudi society works.[14](https://www.academypublication.com/issues3/tpls/vol14/tpls1406.pdf) The characters have been voiced by the creators themselves and by Saudi comedians such as Youssef Al Dakhil and Ibraheem Alkhairallah; Nejer voices many roles, including recurring characters such as Aqil, Saltooh, and the dog.[1](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/03/11/arab-cartoons-animations-ramy-youssef/) • [2](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer)
## Film and the Netflix era
When Saudi Arabia reopened its cinemas and began building an official film industry, Myrkott was positioned to move beyond the web. *Masameer: The Movie* was released in Saudi cinemas in 2020 and became a hit; it was produced in about eight months, with the team judging that the series' existing fanbase made its deliberately simple animation an asset rather than a drawback for the local market. Netflix picked the film up for global distribution.[3](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html) • [4](https://www.arabnews.pk/lifestyle/meet-saudi-animator-malik-nejer-the-man-behind-masameer-county-2269606) The film's success led to a five-year deal with Netflix under which the show was rebooted as a television series, *Masameer County*.[10](https://www.listmag.com/en/see-and-do/a-new-era-the-unlikely-journey-of-malik-nejer-and-abdulaziz-almuzaini-2157) Myrkott also signed a contract with Netflix to show *Masameer* and produced the separate series *Ya'rub* in 2021.[15](https://mawred.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/New-Voices-in-Cultural-Policies-1.pdf)
**Masameer County.** The Netflix series premiered on July 1, 2021, and ran for two seasons: eight episodes in season 1 and six in season 2, released in March 2023, at an average runtime of 20 minutes; TheTVDB lists its status as ended.[5](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer-county) Episode listings give a total of 14 episodes and a 2021 to 2023 run.[16](https://next-episode.net/masameer-county) The series follows the Masameer gang through a global media war, a long-standing tribal feud, and a health craze gone too far, sketching a changing Saudi Arabia through comedy.[5](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer-county) On July 7, 2021, it set a record for consecutive days in the number one position on Netflix's top 10 chart for TV shows in Saudi Arabia.[6](https://agsi.org/analysis/the-rise-of-gulf-animation/) For the Netflix release, English subtitles directed at a global audience were provided by the platform, raising questions about how the culturally specific material would be received by non-Saudi viewers.[14](https://www.academypublication.com/issues3/tpls/vol14/tpls1406.pdf) Co-creator Al-Amer framed the show's approach plainly: "We, as Saudis, tell a story, our story, and as filmmakers or creators don't need to sugar-coat or create a flowery image of our society".[17](https://www.arabnews.com/entertainment/saudi-animation-series-masameer-county-returns-with-a-new-tale-to-tell-2269416)
**Masameer Junior.** The franchise's second feature, *Masameer Junior* (2025), is a 1 hour 11 minute comedy in which three unruly six-year-olds embark on a chaotic quest for the ultimate good deed. Directed by Malik Nejer and written by Abdulaziz Almuzaini, Sara Balghonaim, and Nejer, it was released on Netflix on June 12, 2025 in the United States and is identified by IMDb trivia as Netflix's first animated film from Saudi Arabia; it holds an IMDb rating of 5.8/10 from 396 votes.[7](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31408343/) A Common Sense Media review by Jose Solís called it "one of the most transgressive, hilarious, and sharply observed pieces of social satire to come out in recent years".[18](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masameer_junior)
## Style and humor
The series is drawn in a style that emphasizes facial expressions rather than physical comedy, leaning on the strength of its scripts, which The National credits for the show's popularity.[1](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/03/11/arab-cartoons-animations-ramy-youssef/) Nejer described the original characters as trash-talking and taboo-breaking while remaining distinctly Saudi: people tuned in, he said, because the cartoon characters spoke like their cousin, their friend, or someone they knew at work, people they had never seen on television.[4](https://www.arabnews.pk/lifestyle/meet-saudi-animator-malik-nejer-the-man-behind-masameer-county-2269606) An academic study of audience responses found that most viewers' reactions to the issues raised by each video were relevant to its content and showed positive sentiment.[12](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jammr_00043_1)
## Availability
The original *Masameer* streamed on Netflix in the United States from October 2020 to August 2025 and, as of the most recent check, is unavailable to stream there.[19](https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/masameer) The franchise is cataloged under the alias "Masameer Classics" for the 2011 to 2019 web run.[11](https://flixpatrol.com/title/masameer-classics/)
## References
1. [Arab animation for grown-ups, from Masameer to #1 Happy Family USA, The National (March 11, 2025)](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/03/11/arab-cartoons-animations-ramy-youssef/)
2. [مسامير (Masameer), TheTVDB](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer)
3. [A Hit Across The Arab World, 'Masameer: The Movie' Is Now On Netflix, Cartoon Brew](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/a-hit-across-the-arab-world-masameer-the-movie-is-now-on-netflix-189555.html)
4. [Meet Saudi animator Malik Nejer, the man behind 'Masameer County', Arab News](https://www.arabnews.pk/lifestyle/meet-saudi-animator-malik-nejer-the-man-behind-masameer-county-2269606)
5. [محافظة مسامير (Masameer County), TheTVDB](https://thetvdb.com/series/masameer-county)
6. [The Rise of Gulf Animation, AGSI](https://agsi.org/analysis/the-rise-of-gulf-animation/)
7. [Masameer Junior (2025), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31408343/)
8. [Masameer (TV Series 2011– ), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6298258/)
9. [Future Imperfect, Ibraaz](https://archive.ibraaz.org/publications/77)
10. [A New Era: The unlikely journey of Malik Nejer and Abdulaziz Almuzaini, LIST](https://www.listmag.com/en/see-and-do/a-new-era-the-unlikely-journey-of-malik-nejer-and-abdulaziz-almuzaini-2157)
11. [Masameer Classics, FlixPatrol](https://flixpatrol.com/title/masameer-classics/)
12. [The shifting grounds of humour: The case of Masameer in Saudi Arabia, Intellect Discover](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jammr_00043_1)
13. [GENERATION catalogue, Abdulnasser Gharem](https://abdulnassergharem.com/uploads/GENERATION_catalogue-cover.pdf)
14. [Translation and humor in Masameer County, Journal of Translation and Language Studies (tpls1406)](https://www.academypublication.com/issues3/tpls/vol14/tpls1406.pdf)
15. [New Voices in Cultural Policies, Mawred](https://mawred.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/New-Voices-in-Cultural-Policies-1.pdf)
16. [Masameer County TV Show Air Dates & Track Episodes, Next Episode](https://next-episode.net/masameer-county)
17. [Saudi animation series 'Masameer County' returns with a new tale to tell, Arab News](https://www.arabnews.com/entertainment/saudi-animation-series-masameer-county-returns-with-a-new-tale-to-tell-2269416)
18. [Masameer Junior, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/masameer_junior)
19. [Masameer - watch tv show streaming online, JustWatch](https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/masameer)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Animated television series (individual series) › Adult animated comedy series*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license