Little Mosque on the Prairie: My mixed feelings

Did you watch Little Mosque last night on CBC?  If you missed it, it's on again tonight.  I've never, ever, in my life, seen CBC promote a show like they have this one.  The Rick Mercer Report was like a giant infomercial for the show that followed.  Not to mention the street party thrown in Toronto and ads up the ying, if not the yang, in the past few weeks.

As a person who was once in a comedy development with CBC, I'm happy about this.  A lot of good shows don't get plugged at all by their broadcasters, or at best they debut underplugged.  (Intelligence is getting great critical reviews but they botched the promotion with one sentence taglines that didn't sell the show and it's got terrible ratings as a result.)

I was pulling for Little Mosque, I really was, but I didn't find myself laughing (more than the clips I had already seen in the advance publicity). I have mixed feelings about the show but I'm going to give it a chance.  I didn't fall in love with Corner Gas on it's premiere, nor Seinfeld, for that matter.

My predominant ill feeling was about the cast.  The imam from Toronto was not convincing as a holy man.  I know the show tries to break down stereotypes, and it does, but he is a little too smarmy, a little too sitcommy slick. For that matter, many of the characters were not believable.  Maybe they introduced too many characters at once to develop any of them in the premiere episode.  Maybe it will take time to get to know them and for the characters to evolve sufficiently. Some of them seemed to have potential.

One thing about the cast is, in the context of having watched several seasons of Corner Gas, they don't seem Saskatchewanian.  The actors understandably aren't from here.  But the show comes across, to a prairie boy like me anyway, like a Toronto/Hollywood depiction of prairie stereotypes.  They're breaking down one stereotype and building up another. (Maybe that's only fair and perhaps it's a subtle, intentional goal of the show to depict Saskatchewanians unrealistically.)

Some of the Corner Gas cast are originally from Saskatchewan.  That was a brilliant move by the show's creators because it adds authenticity to the show.  You can't tell me this wasn't intentional (how many national tv actors are from Saskatchewan?)

Mercy, Saskatchewan?  Is there any place with a name like that?  It's kind of a US bible belt name, isn't it? There's no Dog River either but there's a Carrot River.  My friend Laureen is from there and she's funny.  (Not ha-ha funny.)

The Anglican reverend was dressed like a Catholic priest.  More stereotype simplification (I'm Anglican). I don't know, maybe for the show to work you really have to have the townsfolk--the main source of conflict--be something absurd: crazy rednecks who are paranoid and suspicious of the Muslim community in their small town. (By the way, the town didn't seem to be set up very well in the pilot...how small is it to have a mosque and a radio station? I'm confused by this.)

The wackiness of the small town radio station and unrealistic redneck stereotypes is mixed with a more believable depiction of Muslim worship (easy for me to say) and the community around the mosque.  It's an odd mix for me.

The show is well-executed and CBC-slick, and it did break down Muslim stereotypes for me. I think it'd be great if everyone in North America watched the show. We'd probably be a more peaceful, less paranoid continent.  However, an MSNBC article this morning had someone claiming LMOTP could never be shown in the United States.  It'd be too much for the poor Yankees to bare (just like Sanford and Son when it first debuted?).

Little Mosque has potential and I'm hoping it gets an audience, even if it doesn't win me over eventually.  They'd benefit by having the rural, non-Muslim community depicted with a little more authenticity. You know, like on Corner Gas. Comedy has to be somewhat believable to work.

My congratulations to the show's creator Zarqa Nawaz as well as Michael Snook and the kids at WestWind for taking a second Regina comedy to a national level, giving us another first class homegrown show.

Between little Mosque and their eye-opening documentary on racism, Indecently Exposed, WestWind may be our Martin Luther King Jr. of Canadian production companies.  They have my thanks and admiration (Indecently Exposed profoundly affected me and has permanently enlightened my understanding of the effects of racism on individuals.)