Television producer David Guarascio knows what it feels like to be stereotyped. With waist-length, messy brown hair and dark, bushy eyebrows, the mind behind Just Shoot Me and Mad About You has been stopped at airports for looking like a “druggie.”
He and his clean-shaven partner Moses Port came to Georgetown on Tuesday evening to publicly screen two episodes of their newest sitcom, Aliens in America. The show addresses this kind of profiling with the arrival of a traditional Pakistani Muslim, Raja, to a small Wisconsin town that has never seen his likes before.
Following a screening of the show, which premiered this Monday on the CW, the creators hosted a question and answer panel for students. Faculty members Laurie King-Irani of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Assistant Dean of Georgetown College Bernie Cook, Professor Deborah Jaramillo, and Cynthia Schneider, former ambassador to the Netherlands, also offered answers based on their own areas of expertise.
When asked about the show’s portrayal of the overplayed differences between Raja and his narrow-minded host family, Guarascio offered his position on approaching the improper without going too far.
“I think there’s always a social line you get very close to, and sometimes you cross over it,” he said. “But if you don’t get almost there, you’re just not going to be that funny or interesting.”
One Muslim student, who elicited laughter from the audience when he introduced himself as Raja, spoke to the creators about his experience growing up in India.
“My friends and I used to sneak up to my friend’s house and close the doors and watch The Wonder Years,” he said. “We really loved that show a lot, because this is how American culture was to us. I used to write stories under the name of Kevin, because I loved Kevin Arnold.”
Guarascio and Port eagerly asked permission to use this experience in one of their future episodes.
The show constantly raises issues of racial profiling, as shown in the many scenes when Raja is nonchalantly called a terrorist by a classroom teacher, high school students and a police officer who apprehends him for suspicious activities. Such a discussion of terrorism is something the creators said could never have been approached on a network television station several years before.
“We tried to get a story approved on Just Shoot Me in 2001 where someone hangs an American flag outside of one of the character’s office windows, so he’s not getting any light,” Port said. “Well, we ran into such problems with that story because the networks were so sensitive to doing anything that could possible by construed as anti-American. I feel good about being able to do this show today when just a few years ago, that was the climate.”
The creators hired a Pakistani Muslim for their writing staff to provide accurate information for the portrayal of Raja. Guarascio also admitted to reading Islam for Dummies to prepare for the show.
“We certainly didn’t expect to have our pilot screened by the Brookings Institution in D.C. or to come to panels like this at Georgetown, but the fact that it’s happening is a thrill for us,” Port said. “It just seems great that the cultural aspect of the show is being explored.”
