Aliens in America: A New Sitcom this Fall

Here is something to keep your eye on! Canadian Broadcasting Company has had a comedy running this year, Little Mosque on the Prairie, with great success. Let's see what American T.V. has come up with and how Americans react.


July 1, 2007
Television
Did You Order a Muslim? (Yuk Yuk)
By EDWARD WYATT
THE NEW YORK TIMES

THERE are countless ways for a new television comedy to fail: The pilot bombs with focus groups, the series is shoved into an undesirable time slot, an actor begs off at the last minute. “Aliens in America,” a new sitcom scheduled to have its premiere on the CW network in the fall, has dodged most of these bullets.

The series, about an all-American family in Wisconsin that takes in a foreign exchange student as a way to bolster their geeky son’s popularity, has gone through two networks, two production studios and a pilot episode that sat on the shelf for a year.

Now it is one of the more anticipated new shows of the coming season. During the networks’ recent presentations to advertisers of the new fall line-ups, a promotional clip of “Aliens in America” received a better reception than nearly all of the comedies screened by NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox.

While the show could still fail, that it is around at all can be credited to the persistence of its creators, David Guarascio and Moses Port, and the faith of Dawn Ostroff, the president for entertainment at the CW.

“We needed people who totally believed in it to give it a chance,” Mr. Guarascio said recently. “When you shoot a show that you really love, and it comes out the way you wanted it to, and a network wants to put it on the air, to have it put on the shelf for a year can lead to an existential crisis.”

The story began in fall 2005 when Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port first pitched the idea to NBC. The premise certainly had comic potential and was topical: The family, the Tolchuks, are surprised to find their exchange student arriving from London is Raja, a Pakistani Muslim who changed planes in Britain. On his first day at school the teacher asks the class how many of them are mad at Raja because, as one student puts it, “his people flew the planes into the buildings in New York.”...

The new series has not met with universal acclaim. The previews being shown on the CW Web site, cwtv.com, have drawn criticism on the Internet saying the program perpetuates negative stereotypes of Muslims — not to mention of the clueless American Midwesterners — and that it conflates numerous, distinct Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. But its creators say the subjects touched on by “Aliens in America” are ones that are familiar to the CW’s target audience.

“So often people feel alienated in their own community, in their school, or in their family or culture,” he said. “But we wanted to show something positive about that, where if you can just push past the differences on the surface of two people, you can find that there is so much that is similar going on with you.”