Following Alfred Martin’s initial review of The Carmichael Show here at Antenna, he, Khadijah Costley White and Phillip Cunningham had a roundtable discussion on the new show.

Introductions:

Phillip Lamarr Cunningham (Quinnipiac University) is a scholar and critic of popular culture.

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (The New School) studies race, gender and sexuality in American media as they intersect with production and audience reception.

Khadijah White (Rutgers University) is a writer, producer, and scholar studying race, gender, and politics in media.

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AM:     Ok. Well, I’ve been kind of in my feelings about The Carmichael Show because as my review of the series suggests, it’s kind of old school, but still there’s something charming about it. It simultaneously works and doesn’t work.

PC:      In a nutshell, what do you believe doesn’t work about the series?

AM:     It feels like a throwback to the “turn to relevance” series of the 1970s because it attempts to tackle “issues” in each episode. That feels forced to me in a way, but then it also kind of works. Although I will admit that it feels heavy-handed like a Tyler Perry movie in a lot of ways.

KW:    It’s definitely a black version of All in the Family, but I think it’s a necessary intervention. I mean, as an educated black person, it feels like “What If Tyler Perry’s World Met Me?”. Part of the reason it works as a program that keeps us tuning in is because it takes a really familiar black sitcom format and brings it some real politics. I’d say it’s more like Good Times than anything Tyler Perry can muster.

AM:     But I don’t feel like it gets the “offensive” in the way Archie Bunker was supposed to be offensive. So, while All in the Family was deemed cutting edge for the 1970s, I don’t think the same can be said for The Carmichael Show. I think it’s dealing with “issues” but it’s doing so in a way that is palatable for a network television audience. Where All in the Family, Good Times, Maude and other [Norman] Lear “turn to relevance series” were deliberately trying to make statements, I feel like The Carmichael Show is doing it in a way that feels dated and perhaps even forced.

PC:      Well, it’s heavy handed in that there’s always a resolution, it’s a self-contained narrative, etc. However, it almost feels as if he is trying to subvert that traditional black sitcom in a way.

AM:     How so, Phil?

PC:      Take the recent issue about the gun, for example. Certainly, we’ve seen sitcoms deal with gun issues, but the very idea that black men pack heat and, as the father suggests, do so in order to protect themselves from cops or white people feels a bit subversive to me. Now this is not to suggest that the show’s subversive nature always works, but I think it makes the attempt.

AM:     But I think it is in some ways undermined by the way the series needs to resolve itself. Ultimately Jerrod (who is the series’ axial character) ends up turning around his position on guns.

PC:      You’re right, Al. That certainly may be the weakness, but subversion does, in part, require that one negotiates with network constraints, genre conventions, and so on.

AM:     I think what bothers me is that its episodes seem to exist solely for the purpose of “bringing up issues” rather than them necessarily developing in a way that feels organic.

KW:    Yes, but the cool part is that it really exposes all the many issues about which black people think and discuss, the kinds of views that you’d have hashed out at your own house. That’s satisfying. There’s a sense of interiority; all the scenes are in the home. It gets at the ways in which black people engage in these sophisticated political conversations when they’re with each other, some of which involve race but mostly don’t. Everyone is able to articulate a really solid, logical argument.

AM:     I think the point you raise is a good one, Khadijah, but I think part of the issue I raised is that I’m not convinced that the series is having a conversation about blackness for black folks. I’d be surprised if given the way its audience has grown that the majority of the folks watching are, in fact, black.

KW:    I’m okay with that, inasmuch as I feel like it’s presenting the kind of complex and dissonant conversations we have with one another.

AM:     So it might also be that it’s a conversation happening about blackness out of class in a way. Also, I think its placement within the home is a central component of the black-cast sitcom. Other than Frank’s Place, I’m not sure there’s been a black-cast workplace comedy; black folks are always tethered to the home in the black-cast sitcom. Even something like Girlfriends and The Game were tethered to the home even as certain scenes happened at work. Living Single is, at base, a black-cast sitcom about black women living together (and Maxine).

KW:    I think your point about class is an important one, Alfred, and one that is really important here as an alternative to black-ish. This is an intra-class sitcom that I don’t know we’ve really seen since Roc.

AM:     Since Good Times and Roc, the only other working class black family in black-cast sitcom has been Everybody Hates Chris.

KW:    I’d leave out Everybody Hates Chris, because they owned a brownstone in Brooklyn and the mother was a stay-at-home mom. But the Carmichaels also own a home and have a housewife, and that gets at the way sitcom conventions don’t do class well at all.

PC:      Well do we even know what Jerrod is supposed to do in the show? Is he playing Jerrod the comedian? It doesn’t seem so, it hasn’t mentioned (yet) what he actually does. We know Maxine is a therapist-in-training.

KW:    We know Jarrod went to business school and seems to be doing well for himself based on the apartment and neighborhood he lives in.

AM:     And we are very clearly to understand that his apartment is a “come up” from where he came from. The family space is giving me Roseanne Realness.

KW:    Yes, Alfred, I was totally thinking Roseanne!

AM:     The show implicitly is dealing with class mobility as well–that (perhaps) black notion that the parents worked hard so their children could do better than they did.

KW:    But his brother is still struggling. We get a sense that, like so many of us, Jerrod made it but his brother and sister-in-law are still trying.

AM:     But I think that is the implicitness of the series. Jerrod succeeds because he worked hard. His brother didn’t because he’s lazy and trifling (and liked “ghetto” women).

KW:    No, I don’t get the sense that his brother doesn’t work hard. He’s maybe not as ambitious, but I don’t think it’s about laziness. For me, there’s such a sense of authenticity in this show because of its complexity–for example, the episode “Gender,” which focused on transgendergender identity. It was done so deftly, especially in terms of stomping on the idea that the black community is entirely homophobic or unable to have a conversation about gender.

AM:     That episode had me in my feelings. I felt like it was a very facile way to approach that topic. But I think that’s endemic of the genre. I just sat there looking at my screen…

PC:      I think you’re right about that episode being facile, but I think there’s something to be said that the resolution wasn’t neat.

AM:     I tend to hate the “neat” transition from gay to transgender. I think I got hung up on that.

KW:    Well, he said he was gay to test the waters. That felt somewhat like what a kid figuring stuff out might do. And there’s something really powerful about a person who appears to be a black boy who is a basketball star identifying as a girl and saying that she’s not confused about that identity! That is subversive. Like look it up in a dictionary and that scene is next to the word subversive.

AM:     I think it would have worked better to just have to deal with transgender-ness without gayness.. While I don’t profess to be transgender, I do know that a transition from straight to gay (in my case) wasn’t an overnight move. By attempting to do both, it gave both the short shrift

KW:    I think it was an attempt to fit in discussion about transgender identity and sexuality in one episode. A little simple, but fair-play in the world of sitcom plots.

AM:     Thinking about flow, do we think the stakes were/are “just” much higher for black-ish given its spot with Modern Family (and needing to capture a bulk of that audience and being run in the “real” TV season) versus The Carmichael Show as a summer series?

PC:      Well, black-ish is at least partially about the tensions in feeling distant from a “traditional” black life. The Carmichael Show is somewhat steeped in that “traditional” black life in a way.

KW:    In part, because Modern Family isn’t really so modern, there’s a chance that black-ish felt the need to be a lot more conservative, too. But that allowed The Carmichael Show to aim for a different feel. I mean there’s a theme song! Sort of. A live audience! We’re in 1993. Like, if The Cosby Show and A Different World had a baby.

AM:     Can we talk about that? I don’t feel like I am in love with the live audience and the laugh track. I feel like it seeks to telegraph (and control) the funny in a way that makes me stabby.

KW:    In part, I think it’s because we’re dealing with comics who are used to performing in front of live audiences. It helps them in their work. Also, I think it’s very much about nostalgia.

AM:     Part of the live studio audience is really about cost. A three-camera, proscenium set-up series is cheaper to shoot because there are a limited number of sets and often limited editing (because it can be edited while it’s being filmed).

PC:      Well those nostalgic touches are really what make The Carmichael Show a bit of a postmodern black sitcom.

AM:     In the sense of pastiche or in some other way?

PC:      It’s taking those conventions and embracing them, on the one hand, and attempting (the keyword here) to subvert them, in another way. I think Alfred is right when he suggests that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

KW:    For sure, I mean, there are a lot of Gina/Martin moments with Jerrod and Maxine In terms of her trying to accommodate “traditional” domestic roles and feminist ideals.

AM:     I’m still not sure I’m on board with the series as subversive, though. To what degree are these Gina/Martin moments really endemic of the ways relationships function in the sitcom broadly and the black-cast sitcom specifically? Put another way, do we see Gina and Martin because we have them as cultural touchstones?

KW:    The hyper-confident dark-skinned comic with conservative tendencies and his light-skinned, awkward, professional girlfriend? I think that dynamic is there.

PC:      In a way, the well-to-do light-skinned and/or biracial girlfriend/wife has become a hallmark of the black sitcom. In The Carmichael Show, Maxine is clearly marked as a bit of an outlier, which in a way makes her distinctive. Nobody in The Carmichael Show is trying to negotiate with whiteness, which I think is amazing. In fact–there hasn’t been a white person on The Carmichael Show, right?

KW:    Yes! So true. I don’t think there has been a white character. This show is trying to single-handedly keep black people employed, and in an age of colorblind comedy and drama, that’s important.

AM:     I can certainly raise my glass and drink to that. They are very clearly aware of their blackness and interact little (if at all) with a broader white world. In that sense, coming back to what (I think) Khadijah said, there is a sense of interiority in the series–almost in that Amos ‘n Andy way where there is a self-sustaining black world that does not consider or interact with whiteness.

KW:    But it’s also one that’s having really challenging conversations. What other show is doing this? Gun control? Police brutality? Even Scandal couldn’t do that right.

PC:      I think the brilliance of Maxine is that she’s not relinquishing her biracial identity either.

AM:     I think where Maxine does, in a way, represent whiteness in that her views are seen (I think) to stand in for whiteness (often attributed to her white parent).

KW:    We haven’t touched Nekeisha, and I think, in part, because I’m conflicted.

AM:     Can we see that as somewhat subversive and postmodern? Nekeisha as the “quintessential” black girl name and them playing with that?

KW:    On one hand, what she does in a lot of cases could be called cooning. Stealing TVs, showing up just to get free food, threatening to fight or cut people.

AM:     I admit that I hollered when she “found” that television in the “Protest” episode!

KW:    I did, too. Though I also cringed because I wasn’t sure where the “protestors are looters” storyline was going to go. And she has this big weave. I mean, in certain ways, I’m not sure about her.

PC:      However, I love the relationship between Bobby and her because it is complex (for television). Here is a divorcing couple who still have to navigate the same spaces.

KW:    Exactly. And I love that she’s still family.

AM:     But, to an earlier point, doesn’t she make blackness more complex as a “rainbow” of blackness that doesn’t sit firmly within respectable?

KW:    To be honest, I think it’s clear that the male characters are the core of the show. They end up performing the typical stoic, reasonable male role and the women often provide the humor and the jokes.

AM:     I’m not sure I’d concede the center to them because of La Divine.

PC:      Well, it’s interesting how Divine and Grier are actually de-centering Carmichael. And I’m wondering if that’s due to intention or just Divine’s powerful persona and Grier’s embrace of this character?

AM:     But I don’t think that’s on the page. I think it’s them and their skill. One thing I wanted to discuss that we haven’t really touched upon is why NBC? Why not BET or Comedy Central or some other cable network? What does an NBC sitcom (even if they were being burned off two at a time) mean with respect to a politics of representation?

KW:    Well, in part I think the turn to black is about what’s happening with for-pay web TV, the same way we got black sitcoms with the rise of cable. I’m not sure what it says about representation, though. I mean, NBC gave us The Cosby Show.

PC:      It’s interesting to think about the success of The Carmichael Show in lieu of the failure of Mr. Robinson, which also debuted this summer and with a bigger celebrity at the helm.

KW:    Maybe we should comment on why Mr. Robinson failed, other than it being a sad attempt at The Steve Harvey Show. It has a black lead, but blackness isn’t a central theme of the show. It felt like an old UPN show.

AM:     I think a lot of shows with black leads got greenlit this season so that the industry can watch most of them fail and then say, “See, we told y’all all this blackness wasn’t gone work.”

KW:    I think they got greenlit because Empire was successful. And because they don’t know why, that gives Jerrod Carmichael more editorial control.

AM:     For sure they did. But I still think the strategy remains the same from an industrial perspective. We’ve been to this rodeo before. I think the “major” networks are still attempting to “broadcast” when cable is narrowcasting, so their somewhat myopic view of “universal” has to supersede anything else. black-ish succeeds because there’s nothing really that black about it.

PC:      Well, The Carmichael Show also has benefitted from when it aired.

AM:     Meaning that the ratings assumptions were lower because it was a summer show?

PC:      Exactly, Al. It had the good fortune of airing new content just before the fall season really kicks off. If it was a mid-season replacement, we might not be having this conversation nor would it likely be renewed. How does the show grow from this point? Or can it even do so?

KW:    I think more discussions about their careers and choices, especially between the women, would be useful. I mean, neither son has children. That’s interesting.

AM:     I’d like to see it move less in a direction of “turn to relevance” and attempt to do some more in the way of character development. I’d love for it to get rid of the live shooting and laugh track. I just tend to be a postmodern viewer who wants to decide where I think the funny is located.

KW:    I want it to keep hashing out these tough debates we have within our own family. I think it’s helpful to have a space where everyone gets presented in a really humanizing way, regardless of education or occupation. I think that pushes against respectability, too.

PC:      My primary concern is whether it can remain funny with its current approach on a full season order. Right now, the success for the show has been that it has tackled black taboo, but there’s only so much left of that to address.

KW:    Well, I want to nominate that we title this discussion “Y’all All Nasty!!!” after Mama Carmichael’s favorite expression on the show.

PC:     Agreed.

1600 Penn

By most accounts (conventional, moderate left) political comedy has flowered on American television in the last decade or two. And while scholarship on this phenomenon largely focuses on the more daring fare offered by late-night and cable programming, this trend is not foreign to primetime. In addition to the old stalwart Simpsons, the various Seth MacFarlane shows – especially American Dad – engage in national political issues on a near-weekly basis. Parks & Recreation offers another example, as Ron Swanson’s lovably misguided libertarianism contrasts with the lessons showing government efficacy – itself a political stance.

Judging by the pilot, NBC’s new 1600 Penn does not fit into this historical trajectory. Instead, it relies on traditional domestic comedy in the form of interpersonal conflict. Admittedly, the officious situation of this Bill Pullman and Jenna Elfman-starring situation comedy adds a level genre contrast. This amplifies the inherent humor in stock conflicts like those between a button-down father and mischievous child implicitly, and by the press secretary’s attempts to minimize the scandal. However, even in the one plot that is explicitly political – trade negotiations between the U.S. and Brazilian leaders – there are few points to be made about anything explicitly political except for throwaway asides (“Your trade deal will crumble like your nation’s aging infrastructure,” taunts the Brazilian president). Instead, the respective presidents’ machismo exacerbate tensions that are ultimately resolved more by personal appeals and pathos than economic reasoning. And while this resolution is ostensibly political, it serves the narrative more as a way to resolve personal conflict.

To this end, 1600 Penn invites comparisons to That’s My Bush, the short-lived 2001 Comedy Central sitcom parody by South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. That’s My Bush operated on a similar conceit of contrasting the high seriousness of the presidency with idiotic sitcom plots, but did so with a sense of gleeful absurdism. Even so, Parker and Stone managed to insert trenchant political points about abortion and capital punishment into their show despite the fact that the primary target of its parodic satire was not politics, but rather the sitcom style itself.

But in its own way 1600 Penn serves as an interesting document regarding the presidential politics of the last fifty years. Historians like Mary Ann Watson and Barbie Zelizer point to Kennedy’s friendly relationship with television as foundational to the current familiarity we have with presidents. Indeed, the recent 2012 presidential election was at least the sixth in a row where discourses surrounding the losing major party candidate focused on his personal squareness and/or stiffness in contrast to the winning candidate’s relative personability and/or coolness. In a world where the personable has become political, we should not be terribly surprised that a television show taking place in the White House can act largely as an nonirionic dom-com.

On the other hand, elements from the pilot show promise to engage with significant political issues. Two seemingly burgeoning serial plots involve female sexuality in instances where the personal is explicitly political. As the first episode draws to a close, the thirteen-year-old daughter reveals that her crush is named Jessica. Will the first dad (Bill Pullman) be persuaded at the last minute to veto some piece of anti-gay legislation because he comes to understand the issue through the eyes of his daughter’s innocent and inherent love? Or will this become a comedy of hiding her scandalous sexuality? It is difficult to imagine this narrative element not becoming a more pointedly political issue as the series develops.

Similarly, we discover in the pilot that the elder teenage daughter is pregnant, and not by choice. Assuming it lasts long enough, the first season could also offer this plot up as a point for political discussion regarding reproductive rights and unplanned teenage pregnancy or it may become a comedy of bad excuses for morning sickness and loose-fitting blouses. If the latter, it will be obvious that 1600 Penn is explicitly avoiding political engagement of any depth. And if that is the case, why does this show exist?

Why Little Mosque matters to viewers:

• Little Mosque was funny. Admittedly, this is a subjective opinion. Many critics found it “hokey” at best. (John Doyle, writing for the Globe and Mail, described it as “hokey as hell” and – consequently – “gloriously Canadian.”) What matters was the attempt by the show’s creator Zarqa Nawaz to take aspects of Islam that provoke a gut reaction of fear for many non-Muslims and use humor to cause them to take a second look. This was something new – its newness, in fact, was one thing that the CBC’s head of English comedy liked about it and one of the reasons he pushed for it to be green-lit. Even viewers who found that the show’s attempts at humor fell flat should appreciate the effort to find something new to air.

Why Little Mosque matters to television scholars:

• Little Mosque was the first North American sitcom about Muslims to feature an ensemble cast of Muslim characters. There are two important parts to this statement: the fact that Little Mosque was a sitcom and the fact that it featured a range of Muslim characters. Both of these were firsts. As a sitcom, the logics of representation differed from those of the news or dramas like 24. The structure of jokes allowed writers to say two things at once – jokes were funny because their literal meaning was juxtaposed against an ironic meaning. In this way, Little Mosque differed from the news, for example, where words’ literal meanings tend to predominate.

  The ensemble cast was another feature of the show that set it apart. Nawaz wanted to show a spectrum of viewpoints, from conservative to liberal, and a range of degrees of religiosity, from fervent to “fence-sitting,” in her words. This is not to say that all Muslims found themselves represented in the show, of course, but the show did present a case to consider when looking at attempts to overcome stereotypes of the Muslim “other.”

• Little Mosque demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of a mixed public/commercial system for creating programs that humanize people outside of the cultural “mainstream.” The fact that the CBC had the mandate to present regional points of view was one impetus for taking a risk on the show, as was the mandate to represent Canadian multiculturalism, although that mandate’s role was secondary. As a result, the production of Little Mosque reveals one set of conditions under which the Orient/Occident binary identified by Edward Said breaks down: Little Mosque was created by a woman who is both Western and Muslim, and the many people involved in its production operated in a constantly reflexive manner. In other words, the show developed in a different set of circumstances than those that “so far as European interest in alien cultures is concerned, have always been commercial, colonial, or military expansion, conquest, empire” (Said, p. 139).

  The commercial pressures affecting the CBC – a public broadcaster whose funding has dropped precipitously since the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in the 1980s – limited what the makers of Little Mosque could do. For instance, Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly wanted to talk about how belief influences people, and as Darling explains, “There’s still a lot of religious content inside the show, we won some and lost some, but the push was always towards – we were always able to get a better hearing when we were like, ‘Hello! There’s a mosque in a church! Hello! Our characters believe in something.’” CBC executives, conscious of viewer expectations, thought that culture could motivate characters to belong to a religion, but they were resistant to the idea that belief itself could motivate them. As a result, the producers of Little Mosque could not explore religion’s influence to the degree they would have liked.

In the end, Little Mosque represented an incremental (not radical) break from programs that came before it. Many critics would have liked to have seen something edgier, a sentiment with which the executive producers agree. Darling says that one of their hopes is to be able to format the program, perhaps for the US market, and change the things that did not work the first time. I look forward to that possibility, although I suspect that the show would be shaped by similar pressures. In the meantime, however, I encourage viewers in the United States to watch Little Mosque, now that it has premiered on Hulu. It is a fun show, and it is imbued with a sense of hope that is uncommon in contemporary North American television.

In my interviews with the makers of Little Mosque on the Prairie, it became clear that they recognized this, even if they might not have expressed it this way. They wanted Little Mosque to serve as a vehicle for this productive form of surprise, so that non-Muslim viewers would come to understand that the images of Muslims they saw in the news or on shows like 24 were partial and distorted. But they also recognized the economic and industrial constraints they faced in producing a sitcom, especially the need to please broadcasters and attract viewers and advertisers. They decided (quite deliberately) to follow the conventions of the sitcom, as Michael Kennedy, who directed more than thirty episodes over the show’s run, explains:

It was my belief, and the network executives’ strong recommendation, that the show would benefit best by being shot in a very clean and simple, straightforward manner, deliberately without any trendy contemporary stylish aspects such as handheld camera, etc. They wanted it to look very much like “a traditional sitcom.” It would be a traditional sitcom, with a very edgy topic. If it had been possible I am sure they would have shot it with 3 or 4 cameras in front of a live audience, like many successful American sitcoms.

In this respect, Little Mosque hewed to many of the conventions that mark the sitcom as fundamentally conservative, in particular the episodic structure of stasis-conflict-resolution-stasis. These conventions worked at cross-purposes with humor’s potential to draw people’s assumptions about the world into question.

So how did this situation play out? The many people involved in Little Mosque’s production negotiated their way between these conflicting forces throughout the show’s run, in ways that were registered in the program itself. To give only one example, the show’s mode of production changed when Little Mosque was picked up for a second season. Executive producer Mary Darling explains,

[S]eason 1 was … about issues, it was thoughtful, we had a lot of time to develop it. [In] season 2 we went … from a cottage industry [to] a factory model, and we brought in a show-runner who didn’t quite understand what it was we were trying to do. [As a result] we had a couple of decent episodes but we lost our way in that season, trying to be funny and relying too much on the jokes instead of the … relevant … conversation that’s happening in the world.

As Darling further explains, they reached a point where “if you just sort of forget about the rest of the world and just make funny episodes … then it’s just a bunch of funny people, some of whom are wearing a hijab.” In reaction to this situation, the executive producers, with the support of the show’s creator Zarqa Nawaz and the encouragement of people like the head of CBC comedy, Anton Leo, decided to abandon the conventional return to stasis. Darling explains:

So by the time we hit season 3, we went and talked to the CBC and said … we just thought with religion or spirituality or whatever word you want … to address transformational occurrences in a person’s life, there’s something measurable that goes with that, right? … I was feeling very much like we’re missing the heart now. We’re missing the thing where there’s a measurable transformation, so a character can have memory … I want there to be a memory of where we’ve been so that we can begin to measure where we want to go.

It was at that point that they introduced character and story arcs, an introduction that signaled a shift in the tension between the sitcom’s conservative nature and humor’s productive potential. When the sitcom’s conventions came to dominate the show in season 2, they decided to adjust course and change their approach to writing the show.

Negotiations such as these shaped the show for the rest of its run. It was because of them that the show was complicated and contradictory, allowing critics to see in it what they wanted to see. But that texture, nuance, and excess were also what made the show exportable, as I will discuss in my next entry.

Thus there might be the temptation to see these mandates as a causal factor in the show’s genesis, but to do so would be short-sighted. Instead, in my interviews with Zarqa Nawaz (the show’s creator), Mary Darling (one of its executive producers at Westwind Pictures), and Anton Leo (the former CBC executive who advocated that the show be green-lit), people told me that they were responding to a much more complex web of relationships: the one between non-Muslims and Muslims in North America, the one between majority and minority (or “mainstream” and “multicultural”) Canadians, and the one between viewers and the various members of the television industry. To be sure, these relationships overlapped and shaped each other: the relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims was influenced, for example, by the relationship between majority and minority Canadians, although it was in many ways distinct.

The various people involved in Little Mosque’s production were positioned differently in the communities between which they were mediating, and as a consequence, the factors that influenced their creative decisions differed, too. The factors shaping Zarqa Nawaz’s creation of Little Mosque were both intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics). Nawaz was concerned about the growing conservatism of Canadian mosques due, as she saw it, to the influx of imams trained outside of Canada. Her identity as a Muslim and her convictions as a feminist provided an initial impulse, which was shaped in turn by factors deriving from global geopolitical events as well as her experience in Canada’s broadcasting and film industries.

Little Mosque creator Zarqa Nawaz.

The factors influencing Little Mosque’s executive producers, Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly of Westwind Pictures, were also intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics and the Canadian television industry). As with Nawaz, questions of religious identity played an important role in the decision by Darling and Donnelly to produce the show. Darling and Donnelly are Bahá’í, holding unity across religion and race as a central value, and their faith plays a central role in their decisions about which shows to produce. Like Nawaz, they were concerned about the growing mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, their decisions were also shaped by their assessment of a show’s potential for success and their ability to secure funds for its production.

For Anton Leo, the creative head of CBC television comedy in the mid-2000s, extrinsic factors (the CBC’s regional and multicultural mandates) outweighed intrinsic factors (identity). Leo was well aware, of course, of the CBC’s multicultural and regional mandates, but for him, the question of those mandates was inflected through – and gained its relevance from – that of identity. He thought that Little Mosque had promise because it told a universal story, that of the immigrant experience, in a country where everyone (except, of course, for First Nations) came originally from someplace else. Multicultural programming, in his view, was programming to which a country of immigrants could relate.

There are many interesting things to note about how the people responsible for Little Mosque understood their relationships to the communities between which they were mediating. One is worth noting here: for Nawaz and Darling, the show was about religion, or even more to the point, about belief. For Leo, it was about culture. This difference shaped Little Mosque’s evolution, in conjunction with other features of the program that resulted in a complex show with multiple contradictory interpretations and meanings, as I describe in my next entry.

Over the next two weeks, at the kind invitation of the editors of Antenna, I will be writing a series of entries about Little Mosque on the Prairie, whose producers met with resistance for years as they tried to syndicate the show in the United States. Last month, they struck a deal with Hulu, meaning Little Mosque (no longer “on the Prairie,” at least on Hulu) will finally be available to US viewers, as of June 28.

I’ve spent the last year and a half interviewing the people involved in Little Mosque’s production, including its creator (Zarqa Nawaz), its executive producers (Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly of Westwind Pictures), its writers, and one of the executives at the CBC (Anton Leo) most responsible for getting the show green-lit. I wanted to know how humor becomes a medium for “translating” religion, especially Islam, in North America. My questions were prompted in part by reviews such as this one by Michael Murray, printed in the Ottawa Citizen on January 20, 2007, right after Little Mosque’s premiere:

One of the ways that new communities gain acceptance into the mainstream is through humour. Once you’re able to laugh at yourself and your environment, everybody tends to relax, and a sense of security sets in. And there is nowhere people feel more relaxed and secure than in front of the television set. So often the success of new sitcoms signals the acceptance and recognition of a new culture into the mainstream.

Through sitcoms, we’ve seen black, Italian, gay and Jewish cultures, amongst others, take their place in North America. Now, it seems, with the debut of CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie […] it’s finally time for the Muslim community to show Canada that they’re just another wacky and lovable family living amidst us.

Humor becomes the medium through which the Muslim community is transformed and ultimately domesticated (in the sense that Muslims become “mainstream” North Americans). But what exactly does this transformation look like, and what factors influence how it takes place?

The answer to that question, I’ve discovered, is complex. Humor, as Mucahit Bilici writes in an essay in Islamophobia/Islamophilia, holds the potential to draw stereotypes into question by casting them in a strange, unexpected light. The sitcom, however, is characterized by certain conventions that are fundamentally conservative, in particular the return-to-stasis that is typical of their episodic structure. These two features would appear to work at cross-purposes. In the case of Little Mosque, which feature prevails?

My purpose in these entries will be to answer that question, at least to a limited degree. In my next entry, I will address the genesis of the show, examining the role of the CBC’s mandate to reflect Canada’s multicultural nature. Then I’ll examine the program itself to address the question of humor head-on. After that, I’ll consider the obstacles that Westwind Pictures faced when trying to syndicate the program, especially in the United States, and the role of different logics underpinning network and on-demand distribution. I’ll conclude with some reflections on my initial question about humor as a medium of translation.

The series appeared in 1968 amidst a fair amount of controversy considering the show was a light-hearted half-hour comedy about a beautiful widowed nurse and her cute and precocious six-year-old son. What stirred the controversy was the fact that Julia and her son, Corey, were African American.  The series was network television’s first attempt, since the advent of the civil rights movement, to feature black characters as the stars of the show, rather than as sidekicks to white protagonists.

Hal Kanter, it almost goes without saying, was white.  In fact, earlier in his career, he had written for both the radio version of The Beulah Show and the television version of Amos ‘n’ Andy.  By the later 1960s, Kanter, a Hollywood liberal, was feeling guilty about his handy work with those shows.  He attended a talk by Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, who discussed the lack of positive representations of blacks on television and the dearth of black personnel behind the camera.  Wilkins appealed to Kanter because he was “reasoned” in his speech and “not angry.”[i]  By 1968 many blacks were, in fact, angry.  The nonviolent Southern-oriented movement having achieved legislative victories with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to find itself increasingly displaced by Northern-oriented and more confrontational “Black Power” politics.  Sympathetic whites, like Kanter, wanted to do the right thing: he wanted to use his talents “to help the black people,” as he put it.  Kanter probably could never see the degree of condescension that went along with those sentiments.  He could respect Roy Wilkins because the NAACP leader didn’t make Kanter uncomfortable.  Kanter would end up creating a black character who, similarly, was designed not to make white TV viewers uncomfortable.  Julia would not be an angry Negro.

The series, despite Kanter’s best intentions, did make a number of people angry, however.  White critics, black viewers, and racists, all found things to dislike about the show.  Some critics objected to Julia’s middle class status and seemingly effortless integration into a white milieu when the experience of the majority of black people was so very different.  Black viewers criticized Julia’s lack of a husband and the perpetuation of a “black matriarchy” image.  Racists were incensed at the mere presence of black people on television, especially on equal terms with whites, which could only lead to miscegenation.[ii]

That Kanter’s attempt to “help the black people” by creating an innocuous sitcom about successfully-achieved integration ended up causing so much controversy must have puzzled the writer greatly.  As a graduate student, I came across his collected papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society.  In files labeled “fan mail” I found audience letters addressed to Kanter and carbon copied responses.  Kanter could be quite testy about viewer criticism of his show.   To one black woman who argued that the show and Julia as a character were unreal and geared only towards white audiences, Kanter grumbled, “I’m glad you think our work is ‘good for an all white program.’  I’ll pass your praise along to our black writer and black actors.”  Kanter could understand how his work on Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah was problematic.  Those shows presented stereotypes – servile or buffoonish imagery.  But Julia did nothing of the kind.  If Julia and Corey were not stereotypes, but rather paragons of intelligence, style, education, and achievement, how could anybody complain?  That they were the creation of a white man who really hadn’t spent much time with black people shouldn’t have mattered either.  Kanter – along with much of white America – couldn’t understand how the politics of race relations had changed by the late 1960s.  White benevolence on white terms wasn’t going to cut it in 1968.  But Hal Kanter was sincere.  He really did want to do the right thing.

In 1997, Kanter reflected back on the impact of his most significant creation, by noting, “We couldn’t get black people on the air until Julia came along to prove that white people will watch black people on television.  I feel some gratification when I see that.”   In the end, Kanter “helped the black people” by helping white people (some at least) accept a white version of blackness on television.

A half hour later, I re-read the scene as an intertextual jab at the second episode of Allen Gregory, a new animated series following The Simpsons. The title character (voiced by series creator Jonah Hill) is a precocious seven-year-old with two dads. His parents are a study in gay stereotypes: Richard (French Stewart) is natty, nasty, gossipy, and shallow; Jeremy (Nat Faxon) is a sweet if hapless hunk. Allen Gregory harbors a desperate crush on Principal Gottlieb, a gruff and gray-haired woman who towers, buxomly zaftig, over the boy in their scenes together.

Allen Gregory announces over the school’s public address system that he has a sex tape featuring the principal and himself. While the claim goes over classmates’ heads, back at home, Richard gleefully counsels his son on PR tactics. At school, the mousy guidance counselor, who turns out to be Gottlieb’s husband, becomes more concerned that the tape might be real than he is with the boy’s hypersexualization. Meanwhile, Richard banishes friends of their adopted daughter that he finds insufficiently attractive. Jeremy coaxes him to respect the girl’s choices, and the girls are invited back only to be subjected to more of Richard’s mockery.

In short, the series is as invested in humiliation as the cattiest zones of reality TV, and I struggled to find the comedy in Allen Gregory situations. According to the philosopher Simon Critchley, one of many who have offered such a definition, “humour is produced by a disjunction between the way things are and the way they are represented in the joke, between expectation and actuality.” Not any old expectation; not just any actuality. “The genius of jokes,” he writes, “is that they light up the common features of our world.”[1] But there is a paper-thin line around comedy. When an attempted joke obscures rather than “lights up” the machinations of power, that line is breached, and sidesplitting laughter may turn to gut-wrenching disgust.

The pairing of The Simpsons’ scene of fleeting pedophilic wordplay with Allen Gregory came on a day in which, already, a lot of ink had been spilled and bandwidth consumed regarding news emerging from State College, PA. On November 4, a grand jury had indicted a former defensive coordinator for the Penn State football team on forty counts related to sexual abuse of minors. (I resist naming him here, despite how frequently his name and picture are appearing in the press, in deference to his legal right to enjoy the presumption of innocence.) On November 5, the suspect was arrested, and the story dominated the weekend’s news, occupying front pages and sports pages alike. Two other university officials were charged with perjury in connection to the grand jury. Allegations emerged suggesting that the beloved coach Joe Paterno, who had led the Nittany Lions since 1966, also may not have responded adequately to an assistant coach’s report that he witnessed the retired coordinator sexually assault a young boy in team facilities.

For days afterwards, I found myself mulling over the ongoing newsflow from Penn State against the backdrop of Fox’s Sunday night “Animation Domination” block of purportedly “edgy” programming, which has (as much as I hate to admit it) become less innovative vanguard than regressive curmudgeonry. (McFarlane’s October 31 Family Guy episode, “Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q,” stirred up critique from several quarters for trivializing domestic violence — and for lacking almost entirely in humor.) I was reminded of Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives (1983), which recounts a battle over the legacy of the founder of psychoanalysis. In brief, a renegade psychoanalyst suggested that, in defiance of data accrued in his daily practice, Freud prematurely abandoned his original seduction theory, which identified the all-too-common trauma of childhood sexual abuse as source of adult neuroses. If the allegation was correct, Freud purposefully displaced evidence of the uncomfortable actuality of the sexual exploitation of children with fabulized Oedipal fantasies locating incestuous desire in the child’s imagination and normalizing it as a developmental stage. Established figures in control of the Freud Archives took issue, and drove the young upstart from their ranks, protecting the founder of psychoanalysis from criticism.

Likewise, even as alleged victims in the Penn State debacle continue to come forward, Allen Gregory grabs the microphone, and propositions the principal. For a time, it appears that it is children that abuse adults, sexually and otherwise. Recalling Critchley, we might say that “expectations and actuality” are disjoined, relations between “the way things are and the way they are represented” are upended. But the joke falls flat. Instead of illuminating “the common features,” however distressing, “of our world,” Fox has, in this instance, rolled out only obfuscating, acid unfunniness that stings a little bit more in light of still unfolding events.

One common complaint about sitcom laughter is that it insults intelligence: “I don’t need to be told when to laugh.” But single-camera shows like Scrubs and Parks and Recreation replace the audience laughter with other cues: musical phrases like scene-ending drum fills, conspiratorial glances at the camera. The deeper problem people have with laugh tracks might not be cuing, but undue persuasion and even manipulation. What if stupid TV shows succeed in making us feel we have been entertained by sweetening the audience laughter or adding laughs where none existed? A clip of The Big Bang Theory with the laughter left out circulated awhile back on YouTube, with pauses interrupting the dramatic pace, and the less charitable view was that it showed that sans laughter, the show isn’t any good. Such suspicions tap into longstanding fears about television’s fraudulent nature, part of a wider mass society critique that holds television in contempt for its ill effects on people’s ability to think freely.

These feelings led, in the late 1950s, to a short-lived ban on the laugh track by CBS. The quiz show scandals focused public scrutiny on TV’s deceptive practices, and the use of canned laughter was part of a wider sense that television would do anything to hold onto an audience to be served up to advertisers. The commercial imperative would trump any aesthetic consideration, and creative types were known to loathe the canned laughter. But the laughter — real or canned — persisted, becoming one of the sitcom’s most identifying and durable conventions. Some of television’s most beloved classics, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld, have been laugh track comedies. Performers might bemoan the device, but networks and producers stuck with a format that was proven to work.

Psychologists offer the laugh track as evidence of “social proof,” a “tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it” (Cialdini, 116). Social proof is one kind of influence or persuasion, and the laugh track is effectively an appeal to audiences at home to respond as audiences in the studio (or for canned laughter, simulated audiences) have already done. TV hardly invented the practice of encouraging an audience’s responses this way. 19th Century French theaters had hired claques and rieurs whose jobs were to clap and laugh. Unlike theater audiences, however, the TV audience is typically in a private, domestic space and the presence of audience sounds can serve not only to coax a positive response, but also to provide a sense of a surrogate or virtual public experience. The contradictory status of television as a private view of public events (see Spigel’s “Home Theater” chapter of Make Room for TV) is massaged by audience sounds.

One reason laugh tracks might seem even more passé and dispensable today than in the past (though I don’t know that they ever have been well received) is that our ideas of television aesthetics have shifted. We have moved far beyond the time when liveness was taken as TV’s essence. Live here means events broadcast as they unfold, but also programs shot live and broadcast later, and performances filmed or taped before a live audience, like many sitcoms. Sitcom laughter may not always be authentic but is generally plausible as the response of an audience present at the performance. But as TV is legitimated, its aesthetics are moving away from liveness and performance and toward textuality. This makes TV seem more like cinema, especially the more legitimated forms of TV like prime time dramas and single-camera sitcoms. DVDs, DVRs, and BitTorrent or iTunes downloads offer us an experience of television not as ephemeral flow, but as a textual object we can possess, can slow down for analysis, can rewatch at will, can treat as a thing rather than the fleeting experience of a moment. TV was once imagined as a medium for transmitting performances to a national audience viewing alone but together. Despite the continued relevance of Super Bowls and similar events, and despite the function of social media to return us to shared moments, TV’s identity has moved away from this ideal. Textuality — the materiality of television shows as objects to to be read and reread, to be studied and preserved — is opposed to liveness. The laugh track perseveres as the product of an old aesthetic of live performance transmitted to the home, but its presence seems to violate our current sense of decorum, and it reads as a product of another time, an earlier era of electronic popular culture.

References:

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (William Morrow, 1993).

Newman, Michael Z. and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012).

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (U of Chicago P, 1992).

Why don’t we have more period comedies on American television? True, there was That 70s Show, and Freaks and Geeks was a period show, but it was really a drama with lots of funny moments. I first started wondering about this after spending a week in bed with the flu, a stint I survived with help from the first season of Blackadder, the BBC historical sitcom starring Rowan Atkinson. I did this at the behest of an Antenna call to watch something canonic we hadn’t ever seen. Blackadder was laugh-outloud, silly-funny. Its most lasting effect on me, though, was wondering why Americans haven’t mined their history as a comic setting as effectively as the British. Granted the UK has got a thousand-year or so start on us (I was an English major, not an English history major, so I can’t be sure, exactly.). I also wonder if this lack of depth works in combination with our tendency to label any comedy that references the world outside of TV “satire,” and thus socially meaningful. In other words, we can’t set a comedy far enough in the past that it not be considered comic commentary on the present. Maybe I’m missing some veiled jabs, but Blackadder didn’t seem preoccupied with commenting upon Margaret Thatcher or the House of Windsor circa 1983.

I suspect that the execs at ABC picking up pilots in 2011 believe that the TV audience is primed for period dramas. Pan Am sounds pretty much like Mad Men on a plane, after all. The program is from Sony Pictures TV and ER veteran Jack Orman. I suppose this means we can expect more edge-of-your-couch moments than Mad Men, mini-skirted stewardesses racing to serve scotch and sodas in the nick of time before customers decide to switch to Braniff. Poe seems a savvy pick up on the heels of the success of Seth Grahame-Smith’s recent literary/horror novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (coming to theatres in June 2012!) and you can be sure a reference to House made its way into the pitch as well. Programs featuring brooding, damaged-but-brilliant protagonists demand one-word eponymous titles, after all. Still, those zombie/literary novels are all about comic juxtaposition.

Of course, getting back to TV, I’m really talking about two different kinds of programs here: those simply set in a period and those with historical subject matter. Recently, cable network after cable network chickened out on airing The Kennedys, a historical drama about the family often described as the closest thing to a royal family America has ever had. Personally, I think that whatever behind-the-scenes Shriver/Kennedy arm-twisting went on to stop the show from airing only underscored gut-feelings of programming execs that the Kennedys have already received their TV-soap-due a hundred times over.

Now, a sitcom about the Kennedys, that’s something America could go nuts over. The liberals could laugh with the Kennedys and the conservatives could laugh at them, an inversion of All in the Family, with much more appealing mise-en-scene. Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis…the scripts would write themselves. And imagine the stunt-casting possibilities! I think Paul Giamatti would make a hilarious Fidel Castro. And Marilyn Monroe, anyone? If Quentin Tarantino can rewrite WW2 with a spectacular murder of Adolph Hitler, surely the producers could put off the JFK assassination to 1965 at least.

Maybe America is too uptight when it comes to the Kennedys. Trey Parker and Matt Stone did a pretty good job with a first family sitcom in 2000’s That’s My Bush!, and since ten years have passed, it now feels like a historical comedy. Still, there’s no need to venture from the 1960s of Mad Men and Pan Am for a new show. How about a historical comedy about the Lyndon B. Johnson administration? Lyndon Baines, Lady Bird, Lynda Bird, Luci Baines—sounds like a sitcom family to me. Hell, Jim Belushi even looks like LBJ.