Leonard Pitts in the Wisconsin State Journal:
This is what Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll and Motown did for African-Americans. It is what Mary Tyler Moore and “Cagney and Lacey” did for feminist women. It is what Ellen DeGeneres, “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” did for gays.
And, it is why no less an authority than Cosby himself has said he thinks the time is ripe for a Muslim Cosby Show. It is easy to hate “the blacks” as an abstract, but it becomes more difficult once you’ve been in “Cliff Huxtable’s” home and he’s made you laugh and you have recognized your family in his. No, that recognition is not a panacea for cultural animus. But it is a building block toward the recognition of common humanity, and that is no small thing.
So if “All American Muslim” was a failure, it was a noble one. With luck, it will not be long before someone else picks up the baton it has dropped. As the Florida Family Association experience makes clear, success will not be easy. But the hateful paranoia that makes such a thing difficult also makes it necessary.
“We thought we were white,” the man said. They know better now.
Dude, “Firefly” got cancelled.
That is the problem with propaganda, it isn’t very interesting. Negative propaganda can be entertaining, positive propaganda is stifling. All-American Muslim promotes Islam with weak reality show theatrics that are inferior in drama and entertainment value to the competition. It is so determined to promote its agenda that it utterly fails to be interesting.
With All-American Muslim’s fourth episode, Friday Night Bites, the show continues its obsession with making its women dress in the Imam approved fashion and with promoting the Islamic makeovers to general audiences. The birth of a child to one of the couples leads to a spotlighting of the Muslim call to prayer and the adventures of Fordson High School’s religiously cleansed team continues with more Ramadan than ever.
It would be a stretch to call any of this interesting. Watching All-American Muslim is like watching an extended commercial in which smiling people use a product and talk up its virtues, discussing it at length, in order to convince you to start using it. It’s no wonder that audiences are fleeing the show faster than infidels from the Middle East.
In short, “All-American Muslim” failed because it was about as compelling as Leonard Pitts.
