Another View of the Mosque

Hi, guys. Here's my first post on this blog, and it's fraught with trouble.

I won't do a whole lot of introduction of me here - there's a fair amount of that on my blog for my podcast. Okay, that plug's out of the way. :-) It looks like my first couple posts will be about tv, because in my day job, I get to see some Canadian television before you do.

Unfortunately, though, the first show I'm discussing has not only been written about here, but written about by our Fearless Leader and my podcast landlord - and I have to sort of dispute him on what he said. Eek.

Yes, kids, it's time for yet another bit of business about Little Mosque on the Prairie. And in a way, that's sort of the point.

So Justin was miffed that The National did a story about this new CBC-TV series, labeling it as shameless marketing disguised as journalism. What news was it exactly, he wondered. For him, the whole thing smacked of the World Series on FOX ("hey, isn't that the cast of Ally McBeal in the front row?").

Here's my perspective. Let's go back a couple weeks to when I was at the family home in Ohio for the Christmas season. I'm channel-surfing the folks' digital cable when I run across CNN Headline News and that tool Glenn Beck, but the graphic under his mug is about some new sitcom about Muslims. Wha-? Like the one I'm working on? The Canadian one? Yep, he's talking to Zarqa Nawaz, the creator and co-writer of the show.

Okay, never mind this Beck guy was being his lunkheaded self, being all scared of Muslims and the notion of making fun of them and trivializing the threat of terror. My first thought (after "wtf?") was whether the series had been picked up by some station in the U.S. Why would I think this? Because by and large, the American media doesn't give a crap about any television shows any other countries make unless they're shown in the U.S., and I don't think border towns count.

But it didn't stop with Headline News (and btw, what the hell are actual shows doing on that channel anyway? Isn't it supposed to be just headlines? Doesn't CNN have another channel for non-headline stuff, namely, CNN?). As many of us know by now, there was a piece on Little Mosque in the New York Times, among other U.S. media outlets. Oh, and how do we know this? Because the Canadian media gets all fluttery when the U.S. media pays the slightest attention to something we do. (In a way, that's kind of what I'm doing here. Yay, I'm acting like a Canadian!)

Okay, so why is the U.S. media paying attention to Little Mosque on the Prairie if it doesn't air there? I guess it's because it's a comedy about Muslims living among non-Muslims, and Americans still have a hard time having "Muslims" and "comedy" in the same sentence. But they still wouldn't care except for the fact they still tend to identify Muslims as "those people who killed so many of us in 9/11, and may try to kill us again - gasp!". You see, it seems the U.S. media can only talk about stuff that directly affects their country. Though of course, the first important element has to be some possibility of conflict or controversy.

All this is a fantastically roundabout way of answering Justin's implied question of why The National would treat Little Mosque as a news story. I think it's mainly because the NY Times treated it as a news story. That might be more of a cause for concern than the CBC shamelessly plugging anything - something they're pretty crappy at doing on any other day.

(Oh yeah, I just remembered something. Remember the big doc miniseries China Rises on the CBC earlier in 2006? That was the first of a series of proposed co-productions with...the Times and its Discovery Times Channel! Hmmm...)

Beyond all of this muck, I'm actually most concerned that the CBC is going to screw things up on Little Mosque's scheduling: debuting it after Rick Mercer, but then repeating it on Wednesday, and then having it on twice a week, 8:30pm Monday and 8pm Wednesday (eastern). It's like CBC can't decide whether to confuse the viewers or shove the show down their throats, so they're trying both.

And I'm concerned about this because of one little thing that always gets lost in all the media about Little Mosque on the Prairie: it's a nice, funny little show. Go watch it. If you can.