For those of you who couldn’t make our panel on Islam and pop culture at SXSW earlier this week, I’m hoping to have video to post eventually. And it feels fitting that after discussing what the next step in depictions of Muslims might look like after the cancellation of All-American Muslim, word’s out about a new show that could be an innovation both in those images—and in alternative sources of funding for pilot production. Here Come the Muhammads would feature a soldier coming home to tell his Christian family—his father’s the pastor at a local church—that he’s converted to Islam. “I’ve seen all the shows about [Muslims in] sleeper cells,” comedian and show creator Preacher Moss told Illume magazine, which has a fascinating piece on the project. “I wanted to be able to do something that’s funny and meaningful.”

The show’s meant to solve one of the most common criticisms of All-American Muslim, that it focused too narrowly on Lebanese-American Shia Muslims rather than representing the full diversity of Islam. From the sounds of things, it would keep Muslims and Christians in conversation, rather than depicting Muslism as part of a closed community. And I’m glad Ross is putting front and center the idea of what Muslim comedy might look like. One thing some of us on the panel discussed after seeing Marc Maron interview Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW was the fact that while Jewish humor is very much the product of an enclave, it’s also solidly established as part of the American vernacular, an internal conversation that’s entirely comprehensible to the general public. There’s no such Muslim equivalent yet, and seeing how that plays out would be fascinating.

Then, there’s the matter of the show’s funding:

Currently, Moss is in the process of securing funds to develop a pilot – a process that he said is taking a very different approach from previous shows depicting Muslims.“We’re treating it totally as a start-up, so the idea is that we want to develop a pilot that’s the result of community work, not just one guy,” he said.

Modeled after the Allah Made Me Funny project, a comedy tour founded by Moss that aims to portray the underrepresented peaceful Muslims, Moss plans to raise $50,000 in funding in the same way money is raised for building masjids, schools or hospitals – one that allows community ownership and, consequently, community pride. The low-budget pilot will also require less repayment later, he said.
“However we distribute, there’s community ownership,” he said. “A lot of these shows they put out – Aliens in America, Little Mosque on the Prairie and All-American Muslims – they had literally no connection to the community.”


I’m all for experiments in fan and community investment in programming, but I’d hate to think that giving the community ownership could trade off with getting a show like this to a larger audience. So if there’s a network looking to add a comedy with Muslim characters where the creators are willing to shoot a pilot on their own, Here Come the Muhammads might be worth a look.

This is just insane:

A middle school teacher who read to his students from Ender’s Game is on “administrative leave” because a parent complained to the school that Orson Scott Card’s classic novel is “pornographic.” The parent also went to the local police, who have not yet pressed criminal charges against the teacher, according to the Aiken, SC Standard.

Children’s advocacy group Commonsensemedia.org has recommended Ender’s Game for children aged 12 and up — and the child whose mother complained to the school and to the police was aged 14. But at the same time, the school has a policy requiring teachers to “preview” any supplemental material they present in class, so school officials can check for offensive ideas or themes, and the unnamed teacher did not do that in this case.

There is just no plausible way that any of the material in Ender’s Game could be considered pornographic, though I can see why a teacher might want to hold off on Speaker for the Dead, which has both longer discussions of human sexuality and an incest subplot. An attack on a child in the showers is violent and upsetting, but it’s not remotely sexual.

But more to the point, it’s worrisome that a teacher could be suspended for exercising discretion in trying to enrich his class. The key point here, I think, is whether he would have been suspended had he gone through the required preview process and a parent complained afterwards. A review process isn’t an utterly unreasonable thing to ask, but I’d hate to think the school might have still thrown him under the bus after approving his decision.

Schools have an obligation to make sure their students aren’t exposed to inappropriate material prematurely. But they also have a responsibility to steer a course that moderates between parents who want their children exposed to nothing and parents who aren’t paying any attention at all. The classroom is an interim step between the closed environment of the home and the wide-open, unprotected real world. By the standards of that world, Ender’s Game isn’t anything close to pornography, and it’s perfectly appropriate reading for 14-year-olds.

I may find Glenn Beck’s schtick repellent, based as it is on demonization of Beck’s perceived enemies and conspiracy theories. But six months after his Glenn Beck TV launched, it’s relatively clear that Beck’s efforts to build a stand-alone television channel have been successful: 300,000 people are paying either $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year for access to the network, which they can access on their computers, iPads and iPhones, and on their televisions through streaming players like Roku. Between subscriptions and advertising, GBTV is going to make $40 million in its first year.

It would be fascinating to know how many of these subscribers are signing up only so they can get access to content that stars Beck. Obviously, he’s the big draw for the network, but he isn’t alone—GBTV offers documentaries, a survivalist reality show, news analysis, even something called “Liberty Treehouse,” which is described as “a destination for the after school crowd that explores the whys and wherefores of the day’s news through the prism of the next generation.” In other words, it’s presenting itself as a fairly complete alternative for the small but monetizable audience—about 13 percent of those who tuned in to see Beck on Fox when he was broadcasting there—who want all of their programming through Beck’s worldview.

And I think that’ll probably be the model for stand-alone, web-based channels that get off the ground in the future. As much as folks like the idea of saving imperiled but deeply beloved shows like Community through Kickstarter-like campaigns or a subscription model, I actually wonder if a plan like that would be more likely to succeed if you packaged a show you were trying to save with some other programming. I’d pay for a standalone network that included, I don’t know, Community, The Guild, Husbands, and a couple of other shows, web-based or otherwise. Networks like Beck’s will be part of a move away from bundled cable as we know it now. But whatever we get to in the end, whether it’s a choose-your-own package kind of deal or the ability to pick from curated blocks of programming, I don’t think we’ll devolve as far as buying a single show at a time.

I was on the road last week when Louis C.K. pulled out of hosting the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner, but for a number of reasons, it strikes me as the right move, and not a surprising one. Much of the public speculation about his decision is linked to some off-color remarks he made about Sarah Palin, which I think we can all agree were both off-color and not exceptionally funny or insightful. But when I spoke to him at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he actually suggested that it had been a mistake to accept from the start and that he was looking for a way to withdraw. He said:

I don’t know why I agreed to do that. I’m actually thinking of getting out if it. I don’t have any political opinions, I just am very curious. And it’s very interesting to listen to what people say. What’s the best way to run a country and the world? Those are really profound questions. I don’t have the confidence to say that I know one way or another. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue. I just like listening. I try to take people who are way far away from what I think or understand and put a representative of them on my show. I like to try to learn form them. When we did the show with the Christian anti-masturbating lady…it was more fun to have her really eloquent and see if I could learn from someone who never masturbates. There really is a very blissful, beautiful idea behind that. I f I could stop, I would be very happy. When I went to Afghanistan with the USO, I’m a pacifist and i’m really against any violence, and I think there’s zero reason to ever do it. I learned so much from being around those folks, and I feel like I was enriched by it…I think it’s better to illuminate shit and learn about it than to opinionate about it…I’m a little dumb. I sleep too much, and I did a lot of drugs when I was a kid. I can’t handle the responsibility of having a political opinion.

I think that’s both true and a reason why, even though I think C.K. is a remarkable comedian, he wouldn’t have been particularly good at this kind of gig. That kind of curiosity and wonder are compelling and important, but they’re also entirely alien to the culture of Washington, and might be interpreted as an affront by people who take their worldviews and their sense of how to run a country very, very seriously, which is too bad. Stephen Colbert may have mocked President Bush’s sense of certainty, but I’m not sure he was calling the project of partisanship into question as a whole, which is part of why his performance was so effective and devastating. C.K. is a rarer, weirder, more open creature, and I wonder if the whole thing might have been more awkward for him than it would have been a calling to account for the people who sat through his performance.

The bridge is yours.

-Are Mass Effect fans entitled or advocates?

-You’re probably not getting your 24 movie any time soon.

-The best romantic comedy epiphanies.

-Lady Gaga is going on a media blackout. Whatever will we do!

-Dark Shadows looks much more fun than I expected:

So much of what works for me about On the Road lies in the prose, but if this trailer is any indication, the movie might actually succeed at capturing what it feels like to be young and having a set of experiences you’re convinced no one else has possibly had before and that no one will have in the future, because you are that unique:

It actually makes me wish someone would do A Moveable Feast, which has that same sense of impassioned naivete and openness to the world, that promise that “we’ll never love anyone else but each other,” “no. Never.” And I’m excited for HBO’s upcoming Hemingway & Gellhorn which is the experience to those stories’ innocence:

I’m not sure it’ll be good or not, but I do appreciate that it’s from Gellhorn’s perspective. She didn’t want to be a footnote in his life while they were both alive, and it’s nice to see she’s not here.

James Poniewozik points out that, because of how television production works, the economy characters have to work with in television shows will always lag behind where we actually are:

Does TV have some sort of agenda to talk down the economy? Do programmers realize that average Americans are hurting far more than the statistics and positive spin might make it show? The truth, if you follow the TV business, is neither so nefarious nor profound. Whenever TV chases social trends and zeitgeist plots, there’s a lag time. It takes months or even years to develop scripted shows, and often by the time TV jumps on a trend in the headlines, the headlines have changed. Just as it was quite a while before primetime shows addressed the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, you’d have to expect it to be a while before they reflected any recovery. (Just look at the recent Work It, thankfully no longer with us, in which two guys dressed in drag to get jobs to play off the already-dated “mancession” trend.)

Though I also suspect that any recovery and boom—if and when there is one—will have to be well along before primetime TV is willing to acknowledge it. TV networks want a great economy to sell ads in, but TV writers probably like working with the assumption that it’s tough out there—not for propaganda reasons but dramatic ones. Hard economic times create conflict. They provide stakes, and they supply motivation. TV thrives on characters with challenges in extreme situations, and a recession provides a perfect reason to have characters go to extremes to put food on the table.

I’d argue, though, that the current crop of recession shows hasn’t actually confronted the economy particularly head-on for the source of drama. The use of Ponzi schemers rather than investment bankers is a perfect example of this. Television’s littered with Madoff-like Ponzi schemers from 2 Broke Girls, to Revenge, to Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 all out of proportion to the actual number of Ponzi schemes operating and the damage they did. Outright fraudsters may be sexy and dramatic, but they’re not actually the reason the economy ended up in a recession.

Explaining what did happen is a much more complicated process, something that many shows don’t seem particularly interested in tackling. But there are other ways to get at the long-term changes in the economy that are going to affect characters and constrain their choices for years. Both 30 Rock and 2 Broke Girls have alluded to student loans their characters carry—Liz, when interviewing with a co-op board explains of her loan that “It is outstanding,” and Max labors in service to her debt rather than their future. But rather than shaping their decisions. In both shows, the loans show up briefly and then disappear—Liz talks to Jack about wiping out her debt and saving for retirement, and Max and Caroline pay off Caroline’s debt with a party. In neither show is debt the long-term problem it is in real life. Similarly, we haven’t had a lot of programing that addresses the lack of retirement security: there’s a generation of workers who are going to have to keep working much longer than they anticipated, and there’s drama in that, even if it’s not of the “what desperate act will I take to put food on the table this week” variety. It’s true America may be going to work. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll suddenly stop bearing the consequences of long-term changes in our economy that were under way before the recession started and will have consequences long after it’s over.

This post contains spoilers through the March 15 episode of Community.

I appreciate that the day I wrote a post arguing that Community’s static approach to its characters and their potential—or lack thereof—for growth was one of the benefits of the show, it returned with an episode that moved a number of the characters forward, if in fits and starts.

Community’s sometimes had trouble deciding if Pierce is just an unpleasant, manipulative person, or if he’s deeply wounded, and this episode was a convincing example of the later approach. Dressed up to look like, as Troy puts it, “a wealthy murderer,” Pierce is looking for business opportunities to prove that he can be as impressive an investor as his father was. And the other members of the group point out that he can move one of their number forward as part of his project, turning Shirley’s long-dormant plan to open up some sort of baking business into a reality now that a vacancy’s opened up in the Greendale cafeteria.

But Shirley has to figure out what she really wants. At first, she insists that when she and her husband get engaged again that it means the ends of her plans, at least temporarily. “I am going to start a business! Soon! I just have floral arrangements to pick and a DJ to hire!” she tells Britta. And when planning sessions don’t go exactly according to plan, Shirley complains to Pierce, “I’d rather be with my man planning my wedding, and you’d clearly rather be with Halle Berry in 1999.” But when they get down to brass tacks, impressing Dean Pelton with their pitch—”I cannot believe you learned all this at Greendale!” he marvels—Shirley’s clearly in her element. And she and Andre work things out even after she’s late to the rehearsal dinner when she tells him she’s ready to step up and take responsibility for their family, and he needs to let her. For someone who often seems so mired between frustration and a carefully controlled emotional facade, it’s great to see Shirley standing up for herself because she has a dream, rather than because she’s on the defensive about religion or where she’s at in her life. And I hope she and Pierce can find a way to fight back and beat the Subway: Community hasn’t had a villain for a while, and it would be nice for the study group to have an affirmative cause.

In that vein, I really appreciated Britta’s emergence as a genius wedding planner, even though she dismisses her mad skills at floral arrangement with the reminder that “There are people dying in Uganda.” Her ambivalence about what her talent means for her politics was very funny. “This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers,” she intoned sadly. And as the episode progressed, it was a reminder of why Jeff and Brita are actually a much more compelling pairing than Annie and Jeff: they’re both misanthropes with gooey centers who hate themselves more than they hate the people around them. “I promise to make no more than 70 percent of what you would make at the same job,” Britta promises bitterly as she and Jeff stumble drunkenly up to the brink of a mock wedding. You can hear her terror of surrender.

The C story, in which Troy and Abed decide to normalify themselves to make sure they won’t upset the wedding didn’t carry quite as much heft, and I was sorry for that. The show’s had an interesting debate in the past about what embracing weirdness means to each character, whether it’s Troy figuring out that he’d rather be in a goofy costume inspired by Alien fighting zombies with his best friend than hitting on chicks as a sexy Dracula; or Abed finding a potential flirtation with a secret service agent who sees the world the same way that he does. I wish the episode had more time to explore what it means to Abed to be getting along with a pretty girl at a wedding, for once, what it feels like for Troy to be back in his normal guise. They’ve gained an enormous amount from their friendship, but I’m curious to see what that relationship gains them when they aren’t hanging out in their Imaginarium or shooting Troy and Abed in the Morning.