Little Mosque on the Prairie

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).

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.

For the first three seasons this show was charming fun. Obviously low-budget, the production values of the first season looked like it was made by three friends with a camcorder. And the drama was always extremely low-stakes, and everybody (including the antagonists) all seemed to get along really well. It remained very fun, something like a Muslim "Andy Griffith Show," and I'll give credit to the ensemble cast - while the show centered on the new imam, really he was the straight man. The show gave just as much focus to about ten other characters, all of whom were likable and funny. The writing could be corny, but got better over time, and in particular the melodrama of season three was well done...

More than any other show I've ever seen, though, the show jumped the shark, and I wish it hasn't gone on past three seasons. The obvious problem was that the show shifted focus onto the conflict between Amaar and Rev. Thorne. Neither character was well-written, neither actor was good enough to carry the show themself, and anyway the strength of the show was the ensemble cast, which got pushed to the side in favor of a new character. Additionally, Carl Rota was the strongest actor and probably the best character on the show, and he left in the middle of season 4.

I live in the US and ordered the season 2 DVD set off Canadian Amazon. I was disappointed that there were no extras on the DVD aside from really inane commenting on a couple episodes by the show's producers.

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