So why are these elements ignored in trade news and minimized in promotional materials? Have the press and industry failed to recognize this as a trend or are they deliberately downplaying this widespread development across the TV landscape? With religion on fictional television growing, why is it so difficult for press and PR to acknowledge this shift within the industry?

We regularly hear talk of television’s greater edginess—its willingness to engage with more explicit language, sexuality, and violence. Yet when it comes to religion, things get more complicated. Since the neo-network era, “edge” has been a leading logic of the television industry: a way to gain the attention of desirable, affluent, niche audiences who are thought to seek programs distinctive in some way from the mediocre mainstream. Since the 1980s, the concept of “edgy” has found many additional markers for distinction. From NYPD Blue’s notable nudity and curse words to South Park’s free-for-all offensiveness, the taboos of language, representations, violence, and sexuality have faded. Religion, however, remained a vagary. When religion appeared, it was in general, sanitized terms or single-episode sensational stories that nevertheless avoided faith-based specificity.

In 1990, Horace Newcomb described religion represented on television as “the deeply, powerfully embedded notions of the good that must come from . . . somewhere” but that avoided specifics of belief. Little changed from that description of how religion is featured on television until the mid-2000s, when Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and the long-arm of The Passion of the Christ’s success enabled a period of multiple attempts at religiously-themed television shows. At that moment, the press noticed the pattern: For instance, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both ran articles examining the “hot topic” of religious content for television, putting shows like Wonderfalls, Joan of Arcadia, Miracles, and Revelations in relation to each other and wider industrial vicissitudes. However, aside from a few successful shows with multiple seasons, this mid-decade trend died, and so too did the industry’s willingness to discuss religious content as a programming trend. It’s unclear why the industry that was able to make these links chose to stop explicitly drawing these connections and preferring to ignore the trend, but the big gamble and big loss of Kings seems the turning point toward skittishness.

Significantly, whereas Deadline has no problem identifying new trends pertaining to romantic comedies, movie adaptations, and medical dramas—regardless of how many of these series get greenlit or survive for longer than a handful of episodes—few articles appear regarding the increasingly widespread presence of religious series across the television landscape. If such series are discussed, as in this TV Guide article, Biblical series are foregrounded while most science fiction series are left out. (Whither the Sleepy Hollow mention, TV Guide?)

Religion may be perceived as “edgy,” or at least risky, in a business sense in that it is cast as somewhat dangerous in an industrial context. Many industry workers don’t want to talk about it or deflect to bigger “spiritual/humanist” questions. Even if writers use Revelation in a specifically Protestant iteration as the key to a show’s ongoing mythology, they remain careful to couch it among other mythologies that appear once. But religion on TV is the wrong kind of edgy for how the shows, studios, and networks conceive of their target audience. As young Americans and wealthy Americans (as well as coastal Americans) are identified as more and more secular, spiritual, or non-religious by Pew research and through anecdotal encounters, religion—particularly Christianity, which is the main wellspring for this content—continues to be thought of increasingly as belonging to old, poor, Heartland Americans, (i.e., not the desired consuming audience for many of these shows). Moreover, appealing to such an audience is cast in opposition to “edge.” Thus, the industry straddles a fine “edge”: On the one hand, networks use Biblical adaptations to get the ratings of Heartland viewers, on the other hand, they make the case to advertisers that the “right” kind of audience can be attracted to view their other shows by downplaying the religious elements while maintaining they won’t alienate viewers.

In this recent spate of shows, the only notable example of a series that is exploiting its religious content to foreground its edgy bona fides is on Amazon. Continuing to cast itself as the place to go for television that could not appear anywhere else, Amazon Studios picked up Hand of God during its August 2014 pilot season. The series wins at edgy bingo: the main plot of the pilot features a corrupt judge who becomes born-again Christian following the brutal beating of his son and the rape of his daughter-in-law by an assailant that he then discovers via “visions” from God. The judge then conscripts a violent disciple to kill in the name of God. The characters curse freely, the violence is graphic, and drug use is commonplace. Yet it is the exploration of corruption in religion that sets this show apart from others in this recent trend. In bucking the industry’s insistence of downplaying religion as a key narrative element, Hand of God found the “edge” in religion. But you wouldn’t know it from trade press coverage of it.

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.

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.

I tune in every week for the joy of watching Ozzy’s genuinely moral, selfless, humble, and spiritual game contrast with Coach and Brandon’s hypocritical one. Both gaming strategies involve aspects of excess, but the different ways to bring excess into the game speak to the split between Ozzy’s genuine game and Coach and Brandon’s phony game. Coach and Brandon’s excess ultimately comes through over-the-top performances of religious faith, which humorously and ironically point out Coach’s ego-centered motives and Brandon’s mentally unstable personality during moments when they claim to be charitable. Coach’s numerous prayer sessions are less about serving God and more about rallying the tribe to put faith in him as a leader who dictates what cast members to vote off, with the end goal being to put Coach in the final two with someone who would receive fewer votes in the final tribal council. While Coach tries to bring his tribe members together through prayer—a gaming strategy of unity, he strategically plays the game just as much through one-on-one or two-on-one secretive meetings where he manipulatively plots out whom to send home, how to blind side the competitor, and how to have the numbers always work to make him least vulnerable. The tensions between Coach’s ego-centered goals and ego-less claims come to a head in excessive moments, such as when the cast members had to paint themselves for a challenge. Coach painted a cross on his face, prayed during the physical competition to serve God properly, and then quickly gathered his team together for a prayer after they won, making sure he was in the center of the prayer circle.

On the other hand, Ozzy is a servant leader, which is central to many religions. Ozzy’s leadership comes through not in making sure that the numbers will serve him to advance to the next round but by sacrificing his body and potentially his place in the game so that his tribe can continue on successfully. At the first tribal council after the merger, Ozzy offered his immunity necklace to Savaii tribe member Whitney so that she could be saved and so the tribe wouldn’t be hurt. Ozzy also came up with the brilliant strategy to send himself to Redemption Island instead of the tribe voting for Cochran, which it wanted to do, so that he could win the challenge at Redemption Island and then later rejoin Savaii after the merger and give them a numbers advantage. (This worked out, but the merged tribe later sent Ozzy back to Redemption because Cochran turned on Ozzy and others.) A moving moment on this season occured when the members of Upolu sent Cochran to Redemption Island, and Ozzy greeted Cochran with kindness, charitably offering him a space in his covered sleeping area. Most people would have shunned a rat like Cochran who ruined their tribe.

Ozzy is the most moral and ethical competitor in this season of Survivor, but the series delightfully packages him in epic scenes of transcendental religious communion with nature. Ozzy’s been on Redemption for a while, and he’ll probably play his way back into the game. Episodes with Ozzy on Redemption show him communing with nature, swimming with fishes, and climbing to the top of hundred-foot high trees. Long haired and long bearded, Ozzy looks like Jesus. He constantly offers tribe members and people on Redemption Island fish, a symbol of Christian faith. Ozzy is so excessively coded as a Christ figure that his fans are awaiting his resurrection from Redemption to the game.

There are often religious people on Survivor, but there have never been so many of them offering us so much viewing pleasure. For instance, last season when several tribe mates joined together for prayer and Biblical interpretation, eventual season winner Boston Rob looked at them like an alligator calmly waiting in the water to attack his prey and noted that, even though he’s religious, religion has no part of this game and he’ll send them packing. He was right for that season. But things change between seasons. Last season I cheered for Boston Rob’s cunningness; this season I’m rooting for Ozzy. His selfless, humble, packaged-in-excess spiritual style has won me over.

Which brings me to the program’s recent two-part, 200^th episode spectacular, creatively entitled “200” and “201.”  The episodes, which are kind of a mess in terms of narrative, will be best remembered for being South Park’s first engagement with the issue of Islamic Sharia law and its potential conflict with free speech principles.  In 2001, the episode “Super Best Friends” featured a portrayal of the prophet Mohammed alongside Jesus Christ, Buddha, Joseph Smith and a host of other religious figures and no one really seemed to care.  This was, however, well before the violent, painful controversy that erupted over Jyllands-Posten publishing a set of cartoons of Mohammed.  Although there were clear differences between the earlier South Park imagery and that of Jyllands-Posten, which portrayed Mohammed as a terrorist, the essence of the controversy applies equally.  There are those who believe that the prohibition against depicting Mohammed applies universally and the threat of violence hangs over all those in defiance. Even Jytte Klausen’s academic book The Cartoons that Shook the World was published without the titular cartoons, giving many the impression that this issue was being controlled either by excessive cultural sensitivities, fear of violence or a combination of the two.

“200” tries to take this issue head-on.  The citizens of South Park, blackmailed into bringing Mohammed to town, attempt a debate over whether or not this can be done without causing offense or getting the town blown up. The discussion goes nowhere, developing neither the plot nor the satire.  The townspeople, much like Parker, Stone and most of us, don’t know how to debate this issue because, as currently framed, there’s very little to debate.  If one accepts the principle that the rules of one religion, either due to respect or fear, ought to be followed by those outside the faith, then it seems like picturing Mohammed is totally off limits.  If not, it’s an act of cowardice to redact Mohammed’s image.  In any case there’s a double standard.  The argument in “200” and “201” is something along the lines of “if the Buddhists can handle Buddha snorting coke in front of a group of forth graders, then a cartoon of Mohammed fighting crime shouldn’t be cause for death and destruction.”

It kind of makes sense, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to address the real issue.  This is largely because South Park’s strength is in parodying the how of publics debate, not the what.  The program’s satire is one of exaggeration, where a small absurdity is isolated and magnified.  So long as they stay within the world of discourse, playing the role of media critics, they’re very, very good.  This debate pulls them out of their comfort zones, forcing them to contend with embassies that really got burned down and people for whom sacredness is in no way metaphorical.  Comedy Central was forced to censor “201” fairly heavily due to these real concerns, giving Parker and Stone something to complain about but also reinforcing the extent to which this particular debate is not yet ready for their form of satire.  The answer, in practical terms, is “need more information,” even if our our philosophical instincts say otherwise.

The episode, has, however, served the important role of reinvigorating public discussions of the issue, providing some hope that we will, one day, understand the underlying principles well enough for blunt-edge satire to be a productive tool.  For example, CNN here puts forth a refreshingly not-hysterical discussion of the issue.   Of course there have also been calls to violence and free-speech responses that, while politically coherent, seem a bit juvenile.  But, undeniably, the public discussion has been enhanced by South Park.  The episodes themselves may not quite hit the target, but one way or another debate has improved, if not quite in the more forceful manner Parker and Stone intended.

Thought #1:  I don’t entirely get the joke- at least insofar as the alarm clock aspect is involved.  The joke is about a suicide bomber, right?  For better or for worse, that’s the joke.  The clock blowing up, however, is much more reminiscent of a scene from Munich in which one of the Mossad guys who might actually be Jewish (i.e. not The Hulk) plants a bomb in a PLO hotel room.

Thought #2:  In the inevitable Internet squabbling that’s resulted, a prevalent “It’s racist!” argument is that, while Family Guy’s incessant Jew Jokes are about religion, this is about race (the implication being religion is fair game, race is not).  However, neither of these positions is particularly coherent.  Family Guy mocks Judaism, Jewishness and everything in between.  The Goldman’s aren’t so comically insufferable due to their insistence on observing the Shabbos- it’s the shrill voices, effeminate men, hypochondria and so on- ethnic and racial traits.  On the other side of the coin, the “Palestinian” in the clock is clearly acting out an extremely warped view of Islam that, while perhaps sadly intertwined with Palestinian national resistance, is nonetheless a ‘religious’ act.  If it is, for one reason or another, ok to mock religion, this may well be in bounds.

Thought #3:  Then why, exactly, is the alarm clock “Palestinian” and not “Muslim” or, even less offensive, “Jihadi?” A tough question. “Muslim Alahm Clahck” BOOM! would be incredibly offensive but in a way that wouldn’t particularly standout from the rest of the series.

Thought #4:  As always, the real thing here is the burden of representation.  Jon Stewart, Shmuely Boteach and Neil Diamond are out there to balance out the Goldmans whereas I would have to guess that less than half of America, and far less than half of Americans in the Family Guy demographic, can name a single living Palestinian.  And certainly not anyone outside of realm of politics.  So when “Palestinian” pops up in American popular culture, it’s in this context pretty much 100% of the time.  That’s undeniably problematic.

Thought #5:  It’s probably worth noting that just as the joke is offensive to Palestinians who face the burdens of oppression throughout the world and particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s also a joke that makes light of the way in which lots of innocent people have been murdered and maimed. I have no interest in policing such humor, but it’s worth considering how the safety of an American living room recontextualizes the horrors of others.