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.

TLC has cancelled All-American Muslim, its reality series about an interconnected group of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. The show pulled relatively low ratings—even as the show’s buzz reached its height, fewer than a million people were tuning in on Sunday nights. And members of the cast told the Detroit Free Press that TLC explained that the ratings were the reason All-American Muslim wouldn’t be coming back for a second season.

The show was also the subject of a campaign by prominent Islamaphobes. Pamela Geller insisted that the show was offensive because it refused to portray Muslims as extremists, terrorists, and criminals. The Florida Family Association, essentially a one-man front group with a history of running boycotts rather than advancing family values, convinced hardware giant Lowe’s and travel discounter Kayak to drop their advertising on the show. Lowe’s tried to hide behind claims of negative buzz for the show on social media, though there was little evidence of any such chatter that wasn’t inflected by anti-Muslim sentiment, and Kayak’s founder wrote an incoherent attack on the show in response to criticism. Both companies were subject to intense pressure to reinstate their advertising, and music executive Russell Simmons offered to buy up spots on the show, only to find that they were sold out.

That All-American Muslim couldn’t find an audience is disappointing, and not just because the Florida Family Association and Geller will treat the decision as a victory. It was a warm, unsensationalistic show that featured serious debates about religion, obligation, and community norms—in other words, the best that reality television is capable of. This is a loss for quality television, as well as for tolerance.

I’m obviously thrilled to see good ratings for Homeland‘s first-season finale: I like seeing pop culture behave like a meritocracy once in a while. But it got me thinking about whether or not Showtime’s new hit is trading off with All-American Muslim, which is seeing a downturn in viewership. 10 p.m. on a Sunday is obviously a tough time for a family-oriented show in any case, and I’d be curious to see how the show did in another slot, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. But it also meant that a show specifically designed to dismantle misconceptions about American Muslims by showing them living and debating their faith was running against a show that poked holes in stereotypes about Islam and terrorism and gave one of its main characters space to explain his conversion and show him at prayer. It would be great to open up new audiences to that conversation. But that takes time. And it’s too bad to have two shows with those themes competing with each other.

The Florida Family Association has managed to do a lot of damage with its All-American Muslim boycott over the last week and a half, whether by convincing companies like Lowe’s and Kayak to absolutely humiliate themselves, or by stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment against the cast of a touching and totally uncontroversial reality show. But fortunately one thing sanctimonious moralizers do well is make lists, and they’ve kept track of advertisers who stuck to their guns and either continued to advertise on the show after the FFA started its campaign.

So if you’re withdrawing your business from Lowe’s and Kayak and, during the holiday season, looking for new places to spend some money, you can use their list against them. Those advertisers include:

– Big Lots
– Conagra’s Hunt’s Diced Tomatoes
– Discover Card
– Disney for The Muppets
– GeicoHonda North America, for the Accord and Odyssey
– HTC Phones
– Mucinex
– Delsym
– Resolve Clean
– Drano
– Glade
– Scrubbing Bubbles
– Kay Jewelers

That’s not to say that any of these companies are saints, but sometimes doing business can also be doing a decent thing. Next time I pick up some cleaning products, at least, I’ll stick with these brand names. And if I have a secret admirer out there contemplating holiday jewelry, you know where to look.

The bridge is yours.

-io9 has seen the prologue to The Dark Knight Rises and has some concerns.

-The Florida Family Association: inspiring interfaith collaboration!

-Popular websites as Justice League characters.

-Maureen Ryan is totally right about Awkward‘s greatness.

-30 Rock is coming back!

Kayak’s chief marketing officer, Robert Birge, writes a blog post entitled “We Handled This Poorly” intended to address the company’s decision not to continue advertising on All-American Muslim—and then proceeds to handle things poorly again. The chain of argument is genuinely bizarre:

First, our approach to advertising decisions is to choose advertising based on who watches it, not the political leaning of the program…The first thing I discovered was that TLC was not upfront with us about the nature of this show. As I said, it’s a worthy topic, but any reasonable person would know that this topic is a particular lightning rod. We believe TLC went out of their way to pick a fight on this, and they didn’t let us know their intentions. That’s not a business practice that generally gets repeat business from us. I also believe that it did this subject a grave disservice. Sadly, TLC is now enjoying the attention from this controversy…Lastly, I watched the first two episodes. Mostly, I just thought the show sucked. Based on our dealings with TLC and the simple assessment of the show, I decided we should put our money elsewhere. Apologies again.

I’m really curious as to what Birge thinks TLC promised him. Did he expect a show like 19 and Counting or Kate Plus 8, which presented the families involved straight but with the full expectation that the audience would judge them and treat them with almost anthropological detachment? Did he think it would be servicey, whether of the actual advice variety a la Extreme Couponing, or psychologically, like Freaky Eaters, Strange Sex, or Hoarding: Buried Alive? Or did he, as some of his language suggests, expect a show that endorsed the idea that Islam is in some way strange or other or lesser, rather than affirming that Muslims are very much part of the American community? There is no possible way to interpret All-American Muslim as a show that the network “went out of their way to pick a fight” with, unless you believe the idea that Muslims express their faith in different ways that are compatible with and even reinforce the values of American good citizenship is “a particular lightning rod.”

It really is amazing. There’s a fortune to be made in corporate crisis PR, it seems. Or from distributing large charts about the consuming habits and capacity of Muslim consumers—not to mention their allies of other faiths and no faith. I was on a conference call with a number of the cast members of the show yesterday afternoon, and it sounds like they’re holding up well. “The emails and support I’ve received from Jewish and Christian Americans has been absolutely overwhelming,” Dearborn deputy sheriff Mike Jafaar said. It’s a mystery to me why someone wouldn’t want their brand associated with that kind of classiness—and that kind of market power.