In fact, a closer look reveals the broader problem: once-innovative formats now seem tired as their defining personalities have moved on and the medium has evolved. CBC has long been a leader in the public service information radio genre and its personalities have always been significant part of that. CBC Radio contributed much to the development of the phone-out, information magazine, and audio documentary program formats, but listeners valued its most popular programs primarily for their personalities.

Internal documents reveal that administrators recognized their importance as far back as the ’60s, when the onset of television and FM radio necessitated the renovation of the radio service. Personalities were the anchoring force that unified the disparate elements of the long-form program formats that would come to define the national information service. Longtime morning host Peter Gzowski’s popularity was such that he came to known as “Mr. Canada,” while Barbara Frum’s hard-hitting and irreverent interviewing style defined As It Happens’ most successful period. The host of Frum’s program, Alan ‘Fireside Al’ Maitland, was an avuncular presence for a devoted audience base. In more recent decades, individuals like Shelagh Rogers and Mary Lou Findlay continued the tradition of skillful interviewing and insightful commentary.

But while daily stalwarts like As It Happens (1968-) and Ideas (1965-) march on, their formats have come to seem tired and their most cherished personalities have moved on. Ghomeshi was one of the few contemporary CBC radio personalities with the ability to appeal to a large, inter-generational audience comprised of both the CBC’s established boomer audience and their offspring. After some early hosting gigs for CBC TV and radio, he moved to the afternoon to stabilize things in the wake of the disastrous Freestyle experiment (2005-2007). Q debuted there and enjoyed some success before moving to the crucial national late morning slot vacated by the conclusion of Rogers’ Sounds Like Canada program (2002-2008). In this morning slot, the program has established itself as a premier popular arts and culture program with a broad reach in Canada and internationally (roughly 180 stations carry the program). With the former indie musician Ghomeshi as its anchoring force, the program executed a partial pivot away from higher-brow arts and literature and towards the popular arts (especially indie rock) and culture. It also moved towards more of a modular approach to content production with a mix of shorter and longer features. This positioned the program to do an exemplary job of establishing a digital, on-demand presence through its website and YouTube channel. In its modification of the now-classic magazine program format and its digital endeavors, Ghomeshi’s Q established itself as both a valuable property and a bridge between CBC Radio’s still all-too-present past and its uncertain future.

All of this made Ghomeshi into one of CBC Radio’s few contemporary icons. And now, little more than a week after he delivered an audio essay about the recent events in Ottawa, he has been scrubbed from the CBC’s website and headquarters. As information emerges, the CBC’s decision looks increasingly wise and conscientious. And the show goes on with several capable interim hosts including CBC veteran Brent Bambury. But these are difficult times for the CBC. The television service is reeling from the loss of hockey and the Radio Two recently began to air commercials for the first time in more than three decades. Radio One lumbers on with reduced budgets and many repeats in the schedule.

The Ghomeshi incident lays bare the need for a bigger stable of core radio personalities with broad appeal, further modifications to the long-form magazine format, and more stability within the radio service. The CBC must do more to develop personalities if it is to retain its audience and its influence. They’re out there – or perhaps they’re already inside the building. I suspect that the CBC has an abundance of talented hosts and producers working at its regional outposts who could do a great deal to rejuvenate the broadcaster on a national level. How much more talent is there in the more peripheral parts of the country and the institution? Similarly, how many producers are there in the ranks with innovative program ideas waiting to be developed?

CBC Radio’s history tells us that personalities and formats make one another in a reciprocal manner just as they did with Q. My hope is that Ghomeshi’s departure serves as a wake-up call to CBC Radio to focus more attention on the development of more national radio talent both on the mic and behind the glass. This would position the CBC to play a larger role in shaping radio’s future as it evolves beyond the formats of national public radio’s heyday to meet the challenges posed by the digital convergence era.

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.

One consequence of this complexity has been that critics have found in the show largely what they were looking for. As a show that “portray[ed] Muslims with humour in everyday situations,” argues Amir Hussain, Little Mosque “mark[ed] another important development” in Muslims’ self-representation on North American television. Mahmoud Eid and Sarah Khan agree: “Stereotypes about Muslims are refuted and criticized in this satirical comedy, which maintains balance between extremist logic and everyday Canadian values.” Others have seen it as erasing markers of diversity: “all of Mercy’s Muslims seem to practise the same way,” writes Faiza Hirji.

Another consequence has been that program buyers in more than ninety countries have thought that their national audiences would find something in the program worth watching. As executive producer Mary Darling explains,

[B]ecause we’re so interested in religious tolerance and these kinds of things, the conversation always turns … to something more social, right? So, first of all, if you’re a buyer, at the front of it, it has to be a comedy that [you] think will rate. It has to be a show that [you] think can go the long run, but what the conversation would – without a doubt – turn toward would be the issues that people are having with Islam in their countries. So when I think back to … Canal+ in France, there had just been more bombings and fires of cars or riots … and they thought this might be a good thing to just try to create some normalization … [W]e were invited into Paris for a big … cultural festival, and we went and talked at the Islamic center. Which to me really demonstrated why they’re having so many issues – because the taxi driver didn’t know where it was. Taxis don’t go into that part of the city.

One of the places where the producers struggled to syndicate Little Mosque, however, was the United States. (Another was Great Britain.) More than one person recounted to me how they had talked to people at US networks who expressed a personal interest in the show, even a sense of something akin to awe that the show had been produced at all, but who thought that US viewers would refuse to watch it. Given the response by some conservative bloggers to Katie Couric’s suggestion in 2010 that the United States would benefit from a “Muslim Cosby Show,” or the decision by Lowe’s and kayak.com to pull their ads from TLC’s All-American Muslim, such concerns seem well founded.

However, the event that prompted this series of entries is the upcoming premiere (June 28) of Little Mosque on Hulu. What made the difference this time, in contrast to the past? For one thing, Darling attributes the distribution deal to the personal connection that executives at Hulu made with the show: much like Anton Leo, who was instrumental in green-lighting Little Mosque at the CBC, the Hulu executives just “got it”: “They knew of the show, they screened some screeners in preparation for [our] meeting, and they just wanted it.” For another – and I think this is as important, if not more – Hulu’s on-demand distribution made Little Mosque seem like less of a risk. Darling observes that “from a buyer’s standpoint … people get axed so easily in the States for making a bad or risky decision.” The risk appeared smaller to Hulu because of its prior experience distributing programs that could not air on more conventional networks, including, for instance, subtitled Korean comedies that had done surprisingly well.

In this respect, Little Mosque appeared quite attractive: it was a solid hit in Canada, it had been syndicated in more than ninety countries, and its complete run was ready to air. It will be interesting to see whether viewers “tune in” to watch. Needless to say, I think they should, and in my next (and final) entry, I will explain exactly why Little Mosque matters, both to viewers and to scholars of 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.

In a 2008 memo which was one of five disclosed to the U.S. and Canadians administrations by news outlets ahead of their release (available at the New York Times), an unnamed officer at the American embassy in Ottawa runs down the numerous ways in which the CBC has “gone to great pains to highlight the distinction between Canadians and Americans in its programming, generally at our expense,” arguing that their depictions of American Border officials in shows such as The Border (canceled earlier this year) and Little Mosque on the Prairie are “an indication of…insidious negative popular stereotyping.”

I can see why the memo might theoretically exist. The author is right that shows like The Border and Little Mosque on the Prairie utilize tensions between Canada and America as it relates to border security – The Border, in particular, uses clashes with Homeland Security in order to emphasize the bureaucratic challenges facing cross-border security efforts. In the case of Little Mosque, the author refers specifically to an instance where one of the Muslim characters is placed on the “No Fly” list and visits an unwelcoming American embassy (the same kind of embassy where the author likely works). I would even argue that Little Mosque very purposefully engaged Canada’s perception of Americans in its pilot, introducing elements (airport security officers partaking in racial profiling, loudmouthed locals protesting the new Mosque, a conservative shock jockey) that felt marked as American even if they could, theoretically, exist in Canada.

The problem, of course, is that the memo does not seem to read these elements as subtext, instead spinning them as a distinct political agenda. While one could argue that CBC is vaguely “political” (in that one would perceive its news coverage as liberal relative to other outlets), the presence of an overarching political/creative agenda seems a dubious claim. Canadians see so much American culture, and learn so much about Canada’s efforts to protect its own culture against our neighbors to the south, that to highlight those differences is a way to relate to the audience (whether through drama or comedy) rather than a way to make a grand political gesture – the memo seems to understand this is a pre-existing condition, but still suggests that CBC is actively weaponizing this characterization.

At first, it seemed odd that the memo ignored Rick Mercer’s “Talking with Americans” segments – where the comedian goads Americans into revealing their ignorance of Canadian culture and politics – in favor of fictional series, especially considering that Mercer’s purpose is to draw distinctions between the two countries along the lines of intelligence. While this could simply be seen as a sign that the author was uninterested in a historical survey of this subject, the fact that Mercer specifically lampooned George W. Bush within one of these segments seems like it could have warranted a mention in the memo.

However, if you’ll indulge the speculation, here I think we find the key to understanding why the memo was written: the concern is not that Americans in general are being stereotyped or made fun of, but rather that the government and its various agencies have become a villain. If Little Mosque features a character loosely modeled on Rush Limbaugh, or if Rick Mercer tricks George W. Bush into believing that “Jean Poutine” is the Prime Minister of Canada, those can be brushed off as comments on specific individuals within the realm of comedy. When border agents become a stereotype, in particular when they become a stereotype in a show about terrorism or crime like The Border or Intelligence, alarm bells go off.

Their concern over The Border is particularly telling: the author claims that “when American TV and movie producers want action the formula involves Middle eastern terrorists, a ticking nuclear device, and a (somewhat ironically, Canadian) guy named Sutherland. Canadian producers don’t need to look so far – they can find all the action they need right on the U.S. border.”

This correlation has more problems than I have the space to deal with: not only does it essentialize production culture on both sides of the border, but it also curiously ignores the fact that The Border features threats from a wide range of nations, and predominantly places the Americans in a cooperative (if contentious) role as opposed to the role typically reserved for the “Middle Eastern terrorists” on shows like 24. A possible reason could be that the memo was written only three weeks after the show’s premiere, which means that they are basing their argument largely on the very principle of the show’s existence (as opposed to its long-term treatment of the characters in question).

Regardless of the fallacies this argument may contain, the memo makes clear that the fact Canada would even consider the U.S. border to be a site for these types of national security storylines has been considered a purposeful, and political, attack on the United States by the author, a conspiracy theory if I’ve ever heard one. Considering that even the memo admits this is not a serious threat to diplomatic relations, though, I doubt this constitutes a WikiLeaks controversy – in fact, the very notion that Canadian television was part of the memos is so ludicrous that even the CBC is likely considering this a public relations coup rather than an attack on their mandate.

However, I do have to wonder why this memo was among those initially disclosed to the Obama administration by news organizations. That a consideration of fictional representations of border politics would be released at the same time as inflammatory comments relating to actual border politics seems like it could lend legitimacy and representative power to the CBC’s mandate that is (sadly) not reflected in Canadian culture.

It is more likely, though, the news agencies simply decided that a humorous overreaction to a couple of CBC programs was a nice counterbalance to the serious (but “boring”) foreign policy ramifications of the rest of the documents.