The Daily Sigh

Just Leave Islam/Muslim Alone

At this point, I wish the media would just forget about us altogether. Let us represent ourselves in our works. Stop with the portrayals as backwards extremists and stop with the following type of 🐂💩:

BY NICKI GOSTIN (who btw included pictures but I refuse to show them)

It should come as no surprise to fans of writer/director Alan Ball that his latest series features a gender fluid Muslim teen in a hijab.

The creator of HBO hits “True Blood” and “Six Feet Under,” and the writer of “American Beauty,” has been applauded for prominently featuring LGBT characters and storylines.

“Here and Now,” his latest drama premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO, combines elements from both of his previous shows. There’s a supernatural aspect like “True Blood,” yet it revolves around a family, like “Six Feet Under.”

The show concerns a progressive multi-ethnic family headed by an esteemed philosophy professor, Greg, played by Tim Robbins, and his lawyer wife Audrey, portrayed by Holly Hunter. The couple are parents to four children, three adopted, and one biological kid, Kristen, who’s played by Sosie Bacon (daughter of Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon).

Ramon (Daniel Zovatto), a gay video game designer who was adopted from Colombia, begins seeing things that no one else can — like signs of the number 11 everywhere. This prompts him to visit a psychiatrist (Peter Macdissi), who Ramon had a dream about as a little boy. The psychiatrist is a married Muslim with a gender fluid child, Navid (Marwan Salama).

“My producing partner,” Macdissi, who’s also Ball’s life partner, “was a big proponent of the Muslim storyline and we felt like, given where we are in America today, we needed to have a Muslim presence because that’s such a hot button thing for so many people,” Ball tells the Daily News.

“That character’s based on somebody that we know who has friends and they’re Muslims from Iran and their son is transgendered,” Ball adds. “He wants to wear the hijab, so it’s not something we made up. It’s a real thing.”

And, of course, why not? (There are a million reasons why not you ignorant, devil-obeying, crap spewer!)

“There’s no reason that Muslims aren’t experiencing what everyone else is and, to me, that was a refreshing way to tell that story,” Ball says. “It felt like a different way to shed a light.”

The other adopted children include Ashley (Jerrika Hinton), who’s from Liberia. She’s a successful fashion executive with a young daughter who doesn’t tell her husband she does coke with a hot male model.

And then there’s Duc (Raymond Lee), from Vietnam, who’s a “motivational architect” hiding a salacious secret.

In the first episode, Robbins’ character speaks of “so much hatred going around, it feels like the world is falling apart.” He gives an impassioned birthday speech asking for more kindness.

Ball admits that the speech and episode were re-written after the 2016 Presidential election.

“It was a pretty dark day and people were crying and we drank half a bottle of rum throughout the day,” he says of the writers’ room. “I think we sort of realized that’s going to change what this show is, so of course adjustments were made before the cameras started rolling.”

He says the angle of the show has changed post-election in that it’s a “little more aware of the world that we live in now. The world we knew, it’s gone. That’s what’s going on and that’s what the characters are dealing with.”

With such a diverse cast, Ball says that it was important to have a writers’ room that was equally diverse. “I can’t write this show from my own experience,” he explains.

So he and Macdissi met with lots of writers to ensure that the characters’ voices would sound authentic.

“We have a couple of African-American, an Asian-American, a Lebanese Muslim, a half-Palestinian gay guy,” Ball says. “We have women, we have men, we have gay, we have straight. Parents, adoptive parents, people who are adopted themselves.

“All of that has been really, really helpful and it’s also been a great learning curve for me because my experience growing up in America is quite different from the experiences of a lot of other people.”
-----------

No wonder Trump won. Everyone else is too busy focusing on this sort of pc liberal drivel and changing mankind to peoplekind (I know that was Canada but do you really think America is any better?)

Ugh. It's time for Jumu'ah so I don't have time to rant on this article. Someone do it for me?