La petite Mosquée dans la prairie

My partner and I laughed out loud many times during the one episode we have seen so far. The humour is based on townspeoples' exaggerated fear of the innocent actions of a group of bungling Muslims trying to set up a mosque in the basement of an Anglican church.

The comedy rips along at such a pace the show is over in what seems like a few minutes. It is not at all like your usual TV sitcoms with long stretches of laugh track after every lame joke.

There are many juicy characters. The humour is not based on cheap insults, the way so many sitcoms are.

It has so much fun with stereotypes, both poking fun at them and demolishing them.

It is not degrading to Muslims, any more than your average sitcom is degrading to Christians. You enjoy and love all the batty characters.

The handsome young Imam is the straight man, who acts as a foil to the eccentrics in his congregation.

Not being a great fan of the CBC network I have to say they might get my attention with this show. This show pokes fun with mild satire at the average persons concept of folks from the Middle East. This will be a hit if the writers can break the stereo typing that seems to come from the medias attempt to blanket just the negative elements of everyday life. CBC's leap of faith is to be commended. I don't know if an American network could pull this off as their sitcoms seem to be floundering for the last decade or so. I'm old - poke - poke 50 years old. I am willing to give this show a chance - beats the heck out of all these other shows they base on life. Thank you CBC.

LMOTP is very much in the vein of earlier comedies about a new ethnic group integrating into the new world. OK, Muslims are not AN ethnic group and the Muslims of Mercy are am ethnic mosaic unto themselves. Admittedly the show started off pleasant, but less than brilliant and has been sliding on its charm - a bit thin and predictable. Still it's no worse than a lot of sitcoms. A bit gentle and old-fashioned for some tastes, but is that so bad?

Even though I'm a Muslim I enjoy the sex-and-violence appeal of something like "True Blood" -- totally absent here -- but as a Muslim I find it very relaxing, even therapeutic, to see something about Muslims on TV that is gentle and bloodless. Some of these reviews complain that it's not controversial. Why should everything about Muslims have to be controversial? I'm tired of nearly everything on the tube about my religion and my community dripping with snark or going for the adrenaline. If this is a bit quaint and soporific, even if it is simple and clichéd it shows Muslims with a sense of humor, Muslims as ordinary people who might be your neighbors, and you'd be OK with that. That alone makes this show unique and very welcome.

Arguably we all deserve better on a lot of counts, but like it or not, for humanizing Muslims on TV this is the best we have so far, and on that count it's far better than anything in the USA. Flawed as it is, LMOTP is a welcome first step in the right direction.

Let's face it: Most Canadian sitcoms have been and are currently crap. There are exceptions (I like "Corner Gas," and does "Un gars, une fille" count as a sitcom?). But overall, Canada has produced very few quality thirty-minute comedies.

I was thus skeptical when I watched the pilot on YouTube (I'm American, by the way). It is funny. I laughed out loud, and never felt that it was trying to force its humour. Baber and Yasir are both very funny characters, played by very funny actors. I also think that Sitara Hewitt, who plays Yasir's daughter, has some real potential. My biggest reservation is the lead: Zaib Shaikh, who plays the imam, is easily the weakest member of the ensemble. I hope that this improves over the course of the show, or it will face difficulties.

While this show would quickly perish in American network ratings, I think that it will be able to subsist on CBC, hopefully maturing and gaining depth as it progresses.

(I didn't even mention the potentially controversial set-up, but I just want to note that hardly anyone could find this sitcom offensive. Only fundamentalist Muslims who hate everything Western, and white fundamentalist Christians who hate everything non-Western).

Little Mosque on the Prairie surprises me, but only because I can't believe it's still on the air. The only reason this is on TV because of all the hype it got, I can't remember the last time CBC pumped up a show and ran so many ads for a show as it did for Little Mosque on the Prairie. And adding to the hype was the big "controversy" about how the CBC would present Muslim Canadians in a TV comedy. Oooooooo! Have you seen it? So controversial! I can't believe it's still on the air because it's so controversial and edgy, like most CBC shows. No wait, like most pathetic CBC comedies (Air Farce and pretty much everything since Kids in the Hall except Twitch City and This Is Wonderland which they canceled for some unknown reason, probably because it was actually good), it is completely generic, inoffensive to absolutely everyone, and completely unfunny. Little Mosque on the Prairie should be put down like the lame duck that it is.