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Reposted in part from NPR
On the last day of taping for a new 10-part Web series called East of La Brea, the cameras are set up at a local mosque for a scene about a 20-something black Muslim woman who's praying. Suddenly her phone rings and the quiet space fills with raucous and racy lyrics from a pop song. Around her, older women shoot her shady stares.
This show is one example of what appears to be a shift in Hollywood. On TV and on online streaming services, Hollywood watchers say more Muslim characters than ever before are showing up in sitcoms and dramas. The characters they portray are more nuanced and more complicated than usual. In part, that's because many Muslims themselves are writing these shows and characters.
East of La Brea is a show about being in your 20s and figuring out life against the gentrifying backdrop of Los Angeles, told through two main characters, roommates who are Muslim. But that's not the entirety of the women's storylines, says Sameer Gardezi, a Pakistani-American screenwriter and the creator of the show.
"I really feel like when people watch this it's going to feel like [it is] an LA story," Gardezi says. "Being Muslim is part of them, we don't ignore that, but at the same time their problems aren't necessarily faith based; they are based on other aspects that I feel are more relevant to what it means to lead an American life."
Right now, there's an appetite for content including or about their communities in part it is because Muslim writers like Gardezi, who has written for Modern Family and Outsourced, are creating their own content. But a lot of the interest is because the entertainment industry itself is reacting to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment from Donald Trump.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, followed months later by a call for a "complete and total shutdown" of Muslims entering the country, the Hollywood bureau at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC, got a lot more popular.
"The phones were ringing off the hook," said Sue Obeidi, the Hollywood Bureau director. She consults with studios, production companies and writers to help them create more authentic Muslim characters. "We're up against decades of storytelling that is inaccurate many times, that is racist often and very stereotypical," she said. Among the tropes, she said, are portrayals of women as chattel, who don't have identities, or Muslims portrayed only as gas station owners, taxi drivers or violent villains.
Obeidi says it's an uphill battle, but things are changing. She starts to list the number of characters on mainstream shows on a whiteboard. "A Muslim surgeon on Grey's Anatomy; a superhero on DC's Legends of Tomorrow; an LGBTQ hijabi Muslim (she said Hijabi which is an adjective, Hijab is the article of clothing, Hijabi is used to describe someone who wears the Hijab) on The Bold Type; a pork-loving, alcohol- drinking Muslim on Master of None."
That's why the content in the pipeline today, being written by and about Muslims for large audiences, is so anticipated. There's Hassan Minhaj's weekly comedy show on Netflix that begins this month; an autobiographical sitcom for ABC being developed by Maysoon Zayid, a Palestinian-American comic with cerebral palsy; and a new sitcom called Ramy on Hulu, developed by Ramy Youssef, who is following in the path of iconic comics who came before him turning standup into a sitcom like Seinfeld.
On the last day of taping for a new 10-part Web series called East of La Brea, the cameras are set up at a local mosque for a scene about a 20-something black Muslim woman who's praying. Suddenly her phone rings and the quiet space fills with raucous and racy lyrics from a pop song. Around her, older women shoot her shady stares.
This show is one example of what appears to be a shift in Hollywood. On TV and on online streaming services, Hollywood watchers say more Muslim characters than ever before are showing up in sitcoms and dramas. The characters they portray are more nuanced and more complicated than usual. In part, that's because many Muslims themselves are writing these shows and characters.
East of La Brea is a show about being in your 20s and figuring out life against the gentrifying backdrop of Los Angeles, told through two main characters, roommates who are Muslim. But that's not the entirety of the women's storylines, says Sameer Gardezi, a Pakistani-American screenwriter and the creator of the show.
"I really feel like when people watch this it's going to feel like [it is] an LA story," Gardezi says. "Being Muslim is part of them, we don't ignore that, but at the same time their problems aren't necessarily faith based; they are based on other aspects that I feel are more relevant to what it means to lead an American life."
Right now, there's an appetite for content including or about their communities in part it is because Muslim writers like Gardezi, who has written for Modern Family and Outsourced, are creating their own content. But a lot of the interest is because the entertainment industry itself is reacting to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment from Donald Trump.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, followed months later by a call for a "complete and total shutdown" of Muslims entering the country, the Hollywood bureau at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC, got a lot more popular.
"The phones were ringing off the hook," said Sue Obeidi, the Hollywood Bureau director. She consults with studios, production companies and writers to help them create more authentic Muslim characters. "We're up against decades of storytelling that is inaccurate many times, that is racist often and very stereotypical," she said. Among the tropes, she said, are portrayals of women as chattel, who don't have identities, or Muslims portrayed only as gas station owners, taxi drivers or violent villains.
Obeidi says it's an uphill battle, but things are changing. She starts to list the number of characters on mainstream shows on a whiteboard. "A Muslim surgeon on Grey's Anatomy; a superhero on DC's Legends of Tomorrow; an LGBTQ hijabi Muslim (she said Hijabi which is an adjective, Hijab is the article of clothing, Hijabi is used to describe someone who wears the Hijab) on The Bold Type; a pork-loving, alcohol- drinking Muslim on Master of None."
That's why the content in the pipeline today, being written by and about Muslims for large audiences, is so anticipated. There's Hassan Minhaj's weekly comedy show on Netflix that begins this month; an autobiographical sitcom for ABC being developed by Maysoon Zayid, a Palestinian-American comic with cerebral palsy; and a new sitcom called Ramy on Hulu, developed by Ramy Youssef, who is following in the path of iconic comics who came before him turning standup into a sitcom like Seinfeld.
