Review: "Aliens In America" Rocks The Fatwa

Sitcoms provide plenty of evidence for the idea of America as the Great Satan. Just think of Fox's "'Til Death." But tonight, CW's "Aliens in America" proves that the sitcom can also take on potentially explosive material like a Pakistani Muslim in small-town Wisconsin and handle it with smarts and subtlety and lots of genuine laughs. Of course the real subject here is how difficult it is to be a teenager of any religion or ethnicity, anytime, anywhere. Justin Tolchuk and his Pakistani exchange student pal Raja are both fish out of water in the local high school.

It will be interesting to see how the Muslim community reacts to this sweet, funny show about cross-cultural relations. At press tour this summer, the most hostile questions came from midwestern reporters who felt their people were being stereotyped as bigoted hicks. But it's not midwesterners - it's people everywhere whose prejudices and rationalizations are lampooned, and the high schoolers are far crueler than the few adults onscreen. Raja comes across as the most level-headed person on the show, but he too has his blindnesses. I wouldn't say this is a brilliant show, but it's astonishingly even-handed and humane. Perhaps because of that, I do not picture Osama bin Laden cracking up when he dials it up on the satellite in his mountain redoubt. Everyone else ought to find it full of laughs and sweetness, the best new half-hour this season.

Raja's not even onscreen for the first few minutes. We meet lovable loser Justin, a high school junior who doesn't even have the protective clique he'd gain by being a geek. Friendless, at an awkward stage of growth and totally abandoned by his mean-girl sister Claire (Lindsey Shaw), he is adrift and desperate. So his concerned mother and money-minded father (Amy Pietz and Scott Patterson) agree to take in an exchange student as a sort of automatic, in-home friend for Justin. They're expecting a handsome Swedish boy like the one on the brochure; instead they get Raja. Mom immediately begins scheming to return him. Dad is too smitten by the $500-a-month stipend - and the fact that Raja actually cleans up after himself.

Justin at first is as freaked as anyone by Raja's arrival. A Muslim friend appears about as likely to improve his social standing in post-9/11 America as a giant zit in the middle of his face. When Raja praises Allah for his safe arrival, heads turn in the airport terminal. He insists on wearing his shalwar kameez to his first day of school, expecting to "make an impression." Instead he gets comments like, "Apu, where's my Slushee!"

When a class discussion of "differences" turns into a sort of verbal lynch mob, Justin feels sympathy as well as fear of collateral damage. Then he discovers that he and Raja can actually talk about things. Maybe this will work out after all. If he can keep mom from sending Raja home...

Aside from fine writing, this show utterly rests in the hands of the two young actors. Dan Byrd as Justin and Adhir Kalyan as Raja are simply terrific in their re-creation of the uneasy chemistry of an adolescent friendship - notably in the second episode, when Justin sort of "breaks up" with Raja for all the wrong reasons. Kalyan is especially fine in the pilot, somehow telling us with his eyes that he hears everything the family is saying about him, even as he behaves with total equanimity. He's sad and hopeful even as he endures the hallway jokes about "Fudgepakistan."

The show is painfully accurate about the degree of abuse and humiliation heaped on high schoolers who are "different." There are a number of jokes here and even one rather overt sexual simulation that will not please the devout of any religion, but will seem quite familiar to anyone who's ever been a teenager. There's also what I can only describe as a sight gag at the very end of the pilot that suggests the producers have a wider understanding of Middle America's current values than this summer's outraged questions would suggest.

"I had to hand it to him," Justin says of Raja at one point. "He had a real sense of himself." So does this very funny show, which deserves a wide audience.