Little Mosque on the Prairie

I thought it was funny. Little jokes about the misconceptions and prejudices westerners have about the eastern religions and the Arab nationals.

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.

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).

It's not at all surprising that the CBC network has taken this decent idea of a Muslims living in rural North America and drained all of the fun, all of the comedy and all of the relevance out of it. What we are left with is a boring, tasteless, bland, irrelevant yawnfest of a nothing show that can only interest the CBC's core audience of 75-90 year old farmers who have an antenna and still only get three channels. Where is the funny? Where is the drama and relevance? It's just one dimensional characters wandering from one slapsticky gag to the next. We get it already! Muslims and white country folk are different! How funny can it be to put over the top conservative Muslims in the same room with over the top conservative Christians again and again and again and again while repeating the same jokes and the same results. You could end every joke and every scene with "they don't understand us because we're soooo different!" They might as well have called this show "The We Wear Different Clothing Than You Hour! Look At My Strange Hat!" The jokes belong in a 1950s sitcom and were probably actually stolen from a 1950s sitcom. Any child can see these jokes coming from ten miles away. An awful show and another shame for the CBC, I am starting to think we should stop funding them altogether when they seem completely unable to change. Air Farce and Little Mosque? We deserve better than this.

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.