When it comes to racial politics I tend to air on the side of the restaurant owner in Jim Henson's "Muppets Take Manhattan" and say "people... is people."  You can only really meet people one at a time so I assess them accordingly.  Rarely do I waste a moment absorbing ignorant paranoia.  However, when it comes to production I get super curious.  The AAM drama is one of those situations that brings about the questions of "reality" television.

    Seems the gist is that some companies including Lowes and Kayak pulled their advertising from the TLC show "All American Muslim".  Big deal. Show is not exactly getting pulled from the air.  Happens all the time.  Shows lose money everyday.  If it was easy, everybody would do it!  What got me wondering was that in the AP report it read: "The travel planning site Kayak.com also pulled its ads, though its marketing chief said the decision was made because the company was dissatisfied by the show's quality and TLC wasn't upfront with advertisers about how the show would be presented."  Not upfront?

     I won't claim to be a reality guru but I do have a tad bit of reality experience. Its not at all difficult for a story producer to lean too far into a concept and really stir up the observer effect.  Is that what happened here?  Was there too much pressure to shoot and edit the muslim perspective of the shows concept?  I never saw the show and must admit didn't even know about it till it was in the news.  I did however, check a few clips and got the feeling these were really nice and decent human beings.  Were there questions thrown from behind the camera that made the cast feel as if they really needed to constantly defend being who they are when the little red light was on?  Sometimes there needs to be a little nudge here and there to keep from rolling your cams on what they call "eggs tilt to face" for reality.  I get that.  But did these little nudges cause them to lose sponsor money?

  Thats all.  Just saying.  And I say this without pretending that there aren't real issues and agenda driven content in the world.  But, these people didn't seem at all un-american in spirit and I feel like the show could work at a larger level without the overtones.   

...truth is, I'd love to find out that its just a super clever marketing move to drum up some audience!  We all can like a show that transfers some kind of emotion, albeit rather controversial.

... thoughts welcome in the comments

Here is the AP wire:

Here is the clip: