Why The Simpsons flopped in the Middle East

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Why The Simpsons flopped in the Middle East

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One can assume APU the lively shopkeep is stereotyped as a burly red neck Calgarian. Though it has to be a stretch how the other characters who liven the show are omitted. But then we have mosque on the prairie. So fair is fair. Though it would be hilarious to see how they would do Hockey Night in Dubai!

Deep in the heart of Dubai’s Media City — a glittering, still-under-construction paean to all things, um, media — standing alongside the Reuters building, one finds a tower graced with the letters MBC. For most viewers in the Arab world, these three letters are synonymous with television. MBC 1 is the most-watched satellite station across the Gulf and the Levant, followed closely by MBC 2 and MBC Action. MBC 1 programs a heady mixture of proprietary Arabic drama (like the controversial new soapie Aswar), a plethora of Arabic talk shows and subtitled American standbys like Friends (easily the most popular show in the Arab world). But in early 2005, the powers that be within the glass tower began developing a television product that they believed would be a surefire ratings smash. MBC decided to Arabize The Simpsons, morphing it into Al Shamshoon. Thus: Meet Omar Shamshoon, his wife, Mona, and their son, Badr. And welcome to Springfield.

Badih Fattouh, the head of acquisitions and drama commissioner for MBC 1, and the man responsible for green-lighting Al Shamshoon, is precise about the definition of Arabization. “You must understand that we did not simply dub, but we Arabized the concept, and we toned it down a bit. We toned [down] the language — we Arabized it in the cultural sense.”

What Fattouh couldn’t entirely answer in his pleasantly sleek corner office was: Why bother? Can Homer Simpson and his family successfully pack up the station wagon, leave Springfield and head into the Arab world without losing their comedic and satirical essence?

This is a meaningful question when you consider The Simpsons’ status as a North America pop-cultural touchstone — borne out by the anticipation of the release of The Simpsons Movie on July 27— and the fact that it may be the most sophisticated piece of satire of our generation. The show functions as an extremely successful cultural product within the universe it skewers: it makes fun of people who buy branded T-shirts and coffee mugs, while selling millions of branded T-shirts and coffee mugs to those very same people. Despite these very North American, post-post-modern attributes, Fattouh believed the show could fly. “We had great hopes,” he says, moving pencils around on his desk.

The stakes were high. The show was set to debut on Oct. 4, the first night of Ramadan 2005, after al-Ifatr (breakfast) at 7 p.m., the prime time of all prime-time slots. Almost the entire coveted Saudi Arabian market — 22 million people with nothing to do but watch television — would be tuned in, as would much of the rest of the region. (Ramadan is equivalent to sweeps season in the U.S., and advertisers pay top dollar for spots on shows they believe will be successful.) Although Fattouh and MBC will give no figures, the licence fees from 20th Century Fox could not have been cheap. Given the show’s status, to produce it appropriately would require enlisting some of the best writing talent in the Arab world, as well as three major Egyptian movie stars. Cairo, and to a lesser extent Beirut, have for decades been the Arab world’s Hollywood; all the creative minds in the Arabization process of The Simpsons were Egyptian. Mohamed Henedi, a comedic force and household name, was hand-picked by MBC to play Homer, sorry, Omar Shamshoon. (Shamshoon is a traditional Arabic name, with connotations of strong, powerful men.)

MBC decided against Arabizing the early seasons and started with the classics (Season 4 and on). They started with iconic episodes like Sideshow Bob versus Bart, the three-eyed fish and the strike at the nuclear power plant. It almost goes without saying, however, that an episode like Season 4’s Homer the Heretic — in which Homer forgoes church, is visited by God and starts his own religion — did not make the grade. Nor did references to Krusty the Klown’s father, Rabbi Krustofski. (An ex-Disney employee in Lebanon told me that if a TV station can help it, they’ll excise references to Judaism from shows meant for the pan-Arab market.)

There were other changes, not all of them well-received. “They've ruined it! Oh yes they have, sob. ... Why? Why, why oh why?!!!!” wrote a blogger, Noors, living in Oman. It soon became clear that something had gone horribly wrong.

Fattouh shifts in his plush office chair and says: “The show was not a big success. Otherwise, of course, we would have continued to do another season. I would say it was fairly received, but average. This made us reconsider.” That’s putting it mildly. MBC’s core viewers were baffled. From most accounts, the show was incoherent; the problems were most prevalent in the all-important Saudi Arabian market. Saudis struggling to digest their first meal in 12 hours wondered, understandably, why they were watching cartoons, which is not considered an adult pursuit in their country. Most viewers probably clicked over to MBC 2 or one of the ubiquitous channels playing Qur’anic exegesis.

Those who know the original The Simpsons were horrified. “I don’t understand the sheiks at MBC,” Al Shamshoon’s writer, Amr Hosny tells me. (Hosny is not using a pejorative: MBC is actually owned by Saudi sheiks.) He is the go-to guy for adaptation scriptwriting in the Arab world; his version of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life is apparently superlative. “When we started, I had to go back and study [the show], and I understood that this was a very American piece of pop culture — and I felt that it would never be done this way. I had to make some idea that would be an objective correlative for the Arabic people. So I got the idea to make a fictitious town called Little Arab Town, and it would give us a good reason why these people are American, but also Arab. The sheiks refused.” Instead, Springfield remained, and there was no coherent explanation given as to why a full Arab community exists within the middle of Middle America.

“So there were other problems,” says Hosny. “This guy Homer drinks beer all the time, but this is a sin to the Arabs. So I told them that he will drink she’er — which is a [non-alcoholic] malt drink, and close to beer in sound, so good for dubbing. But they refused this. They said we must make it ‘juice.’” And so on. Through a steady process of cross-cultural attrition — no bacon sandwiches, no Moe’s Tavern, church becomes masjid (mosque) — The Simpsons was whittled down to a shadow of itself. As for Smithers’s feelings for Mr. Burns? “I naturally tried to underemphasize that,” says Hosny.

It didn’t have to be that way. “I loved it,” says Hosny of the show. “I take off my chapeau: they are very good artists. And the writers are unbelievable. I loved the character of Homer. There is something very strange about this character. It’s very close to the Egyptian point of view. He’s a very simple and kind person; from some points of view you feel that he’s incredibly stupid, and from some points of view you feel he is wise. Sometimes I felt I was talking about an Egyptian person. Nothing is certain and taken for granted — it’s not ipso facto — and this makes good art.”

Fattouh has other ideas. “You see, culturally, it didn’t cross very well. Maybe the sense of humour is too North American. Comedy is especially a culturally sensitive matter. What you can define as funny is an outcome of learnings, habits, doings, local behaviour — it is the sum of so many factors. Drama is one thing, but with comedy, it is black and white. Deep inside, either you laugh or you say, ‘No, this is not funny.’ They did not think this was funny.”

It’s difficult not to think of this as a missed opportunity. Shows like The Simpsons, pieces of pop art that explicate the ironies of North American life, play an important role in bridging cultural confusion. “When people from this Third World see that the American Dream is not perfect,” says Hosny, “that it is full of flaws, it can give to them some hope, and says that if you want to dream, dream here! And that over there, in Dreamland, they live in the same world of mistakes and flaws. I’m sick of how people think that going to the States means going to heaven. I understand that it still may be good to them, but it’s important, vital, for them to see the cracks in the façade.”

Four days after the end of Ramadan 2005, 34 episodes into its 52-episode run, Al Shamshoon was pulled from MBC 1. It is a lesson in cross-cultural adaptation, and a warning of how delicate a powerful piece of television art like The Simpsons actually is. But regardless of how specifically North American it may be, The Simpsons does have fans (like the blogger Noor) in cultures often very different from our own. Those Muslim fans may not drink beer (although many do), but they don’t begrudge Homer his six-pack of Duff. As the man himself would put it: “Mmmm. Sacrilicious.”

Richard Poplak is travelling the Muslim world looking for examples of North American pop culture. His book on the subject will be published by Penguin Books in September 2008.