Over the last decade, when someone asked how they could catch a glimpse inside the real Jeddah and the lives of its young people, the answer has been simple: Watch Takki.
The cult web series, created by Mohammed Makki, became a phenomenon on YouTube after no television station would take on the boundary-pushing material, and even now, nine years after its debut, it’s still unlike anything the Kingdom has produced.
For its third season, the show has grown past YouTube and is ready for a wider audience, debuting as a major series on Netflix, the world’s biggest streaming platform, and dubbed into six languages, making it ripe for global discovery. Looking back, the show traces perhaps the most important decade in the Kingdom’s history, as a new generation eager for something new pushed their country into the future.
“For me, Takki isn’t only a work of expressive drama, the show for me is a story that deserves to be passed on to my kids and grandkids,” says the show’s lead star Moayed Althagafi, who plays Malik.
It’s hard to say if even its creator knew the gravity of what he was producing—he just wanted to make something new. In his early 20s when he started, Mohammed Makki knew he was pushing boundaries—but he had no idea if it would all work. After all, he’d only done a few short films before with his friends and cousins, and quietly had no idea if he could live up to his own ambitions.
“The moment that I always think back to now is way back when we started making the first season. We all travelled together, and I still didn’t know the guys well. It was a real, honest adventure, because we were all taking a huge risk. It was a risk that turned out to be amazing,” Makki tells us.
“We all started with love for creating cinema, and creating a good show so we didn’t have any expectations for success or how the public was going to react. We started with love and we keep going with love, and that’s the thing that gives me peace in my heart,” he continues.
The show’s second season finished in 2015, leaving Makki and the show’s stars unsure if there would ever be another opportunity to work together, let alone make more Takki. Reuniting for the third season, any worries that they had changed too much to be able to capture the same magic was immediately dispelled the day they walked back onto the set.
“The beautiful thing is that we’re more similar than different. Yes, we all have different personalities, we all have different passions, but we all are the same when it comes to loving Takki. We loved it from the beginning. It’s what gave us all our start in the business, so it will always be our favorite thing to make. We were similar back then, and this still unites us,” says Ali Alsharif, who plays Majid.
“Thank God the things that didn’t change are the beautiful things,” adds Makki. “We started passionate, we loved the world of Takki and the pure filmmaking it allowed us to do, and after 10 years we still all feel the same way. That’s my favorite thing about this honestly, that and that, at a basic level, we’re still together.”
What has changed is Jeddah itself. As the city has grown and modernized, so much of the country’s reforms directly affects the characters. When it started, Malik was a filmmaker in a country without cinemas. Bayan, played by Khairia Abu Laban, was a girl who dreamed of getting out on her own, stuck without a mode of transport. Now, as women can drive and cinemas are thriving, season 3 offers new paradigms for its characters.
As season 3 debuts, as happy as Makki and company are to be making content that will be available in 190 countries in 23 languages, they still have bigger aspirations. If anything, the achievement has made them more ambitious than ever before.
“Just because things have changed, though, doesn’t mean it’s now easy. Yes, in the first two he was an aspiring filmmaker, but now that in season 3 there are cinemas, but what does that mean for this aspiring director and his actions now that he has all the possibilities for him to have a movie? this is what you get to see in season 3,” says Althagafi.
“From my side, I hope that we continue in the field and we can focus on making movies and TV shows all the time,” says Makki.
“I wish to see all our cast continue on to higher and higher heights. I want them all to get to the Oscars—and me with them, Inshallah,” he adds with a laugh.
Takki season 3 is streaming only on Netflix starting October 28
Translation by Judy Hasn