Changing places
Character development, American style
BY Jason Anderson
Illustration by Dave Donald
The fictitious cable-access show known to the world as Wayne’s World may have put Aurora, Illinois, on the popculture map, but that was not its original home. The story goes that Mike Myers set it there because he needed an American equivalent to his hometown of Scarborough, Ontario, evidently fearing that Saturday Night Live’s audience would mistake his headbanger for a hoser.
Since the sketch never left Wayne’s basement, it didn’t make much difference where they were until the 1992 movie version. Suddenly, Wayne and Garth were placed in a Bizarroworld version of Scarborough in which Tim Hortons had been replaced by Stan Mikita’s Donuts and fabled Yonge Street metal bar The Gasworks got a slick overhaul.
I was reminded of this story by two recent events. One was the flop of Myers’ The Love Guru, though it’s hard to decide which of his dubious decisions was the biggest reason for the movie’s failure: setting it in Toronto, filling it with hockey or plugging Deepak Chopra in between caca gags. The other was the news that Little Mosque on the Prairie had been acquired by Fox. This was not the same sort of deal that turned Corner Gas— Saskatchewan’s other well-loved contribution to Canadian TV—into reliable space-filler for WGN.
Little Mosque will be revamped as an American show with a new cast and setting, though one suspects that, as with the transplanted version of The Office, characters and storylines will be avidly recycled. Should the writers currently at work on the project be looking for a plausible standin for Mercy, Saskatchewan (actually a hodgepodge of Regina and Toronto locations), I would not recommend Aurora, though I hear the city’s regular farmers’ markets are quite picturesque.
Missing in the media hubbub that greeted the Fox announcement in June were any reservations about what might get lost in translation. Perhaps the success of the U.S. versions of The Office and Ugly Betty (first devised in Colombia) have instilled greater confidence in the networks’ ability to revamp foreign shows than there was back when they made doomed attempts to Americanize the likes of Fawlty Towers. The current TV schedule is now crowded with retooled imports, ranging from Hell’s Kitchen, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars (all British-born) to HBO’s In Treatment (Israel) and one of this fall’s most promising sitcoms, Kath & Kim (Australia). The sophistication of this process of cultural adaptation has generally increased, but it’s not flawless.
While Steve Carell’s neurotic boss has less of the overt and quintessentially English cruelty displayed by Ricky Gervais on the original Office, the particular neuroses of the patients on In Treatment seem more specific to Israelis than Americans. Many of the elements that make a series work defy that sort of one-toone, Aurora-equals-Scarborough equivalency.
Then again, the likes of Ugly Betty and Pop Idol continue to conquer every territory in TV’s international marketplace so maybe the folks who sold Little Mosque on the Prairie have every right to expect it’ll arrive intact. As exec producer Mary Darling told the National Post, “Fox got the creative vision of the show, that it has to be funny while it treads sensitively on certain Muslim issues.”
But the only other recent American series to foreground a Muslim character not in danger of being tortured by Jack Bauer was Aliens in America, a short-lived sitcom on the CW network in which a geeky white high schooler found himself stuck living with Raja, a Pakistani exchange student. Set in Wisconsin but shot (oh, the irony!) in Canada, the show largely situated its tentative stabs at racial and cultural commentary within the familiarly quirky family-com mode of Malcolm in the Middle (and, in its best moments, Freaks and Geeks).
Raja’s ignorance of the customs and rituals of teenage life in America was the principal source of the humour, a condition that could be chalked up to his general foreignness rather than anything to do with Islam. Yet on the whole, the show’s display of intelligence and sensitivity made it worlds apart from 24, the weekly torture-fest by the same network that will soon be introducing Little Mosque into American homes.
It’s also hard to see how the CBC show will fare given network TV’s continuing reticence to present differences of race, religion and class in anything but the most oppositional terms. The MO of a typical episode of Little Mosque—a storm-in-teakettle kerfuffle over a cultural or religious difference, usually presented with such overweening earnestness that the genial absurdism of Corner Gas seems radical by comparison—is likely destined for a major overhaul. But who knows? If the American version spends less time than the original does trying to make its viewers feel proud of their own sensitivity to such multicultural matters, it might make them laugh more often.
