Unfair & Ugly: New Muslim American TV Show
By Yumna Khan
Stranger Magic Productions
Dear Team at Pakistan Link,
My name is Yumna Khan. My dear friend Nida Chowdhry and I started a production company called Stranger Magic Productions. We're two women-of-color creators delivering diverse, high-quality entertainment (Netflix, Hulu, etc.).
We both are active followers of Pakistan Link and are too excited to shLinkreproducesre the launch of our Official Series Trailer for our new TV show Unfair & Ugly, a dramedy about a South Asian Muslim American family in Orange County, California trying to keep it together. The show is six episodes long, 22+ minutes each. We’re currently in post-production and plan to license our show to a digital platform.
In the last couple weeks, OC Register, Splinter + Jorge Ramos, and India West shared the news with their audiences, and we’re currently working with a few more outlets.
You can view our official series trailer here. We’ve had 50K+ views and 400+ shares in under 3 days (across multiple videos).
This show is groundbreaking as it is one of the first scripted TV shows about a South Asian American family and a Muslim American family, and one of the few shows about an Asian American family.
We’d love for you to share our trailer and show with your readers at Pakistan Link! We look forward to hearing from you.
Link reproduces Orange County Register’s review: ‘Unfair & Ugly’ views Orange County through a Muslim-American lens — and it’s not ‘The O.C.’
Yumna Khan and Nida Chowdhry met as teens in a youth group at the Islamic Center of Irvine — Chowdhry’s parents are from Pakistan and Khan’s from India.
Chowdhry, now 30, went on to study film and media at UC Irvine and Khan, 24, got a communications degree from UC San Diego.
Now, the two women have blended their education, backgrounds and life experience to create what they call “a six-episode dramedy” titled “Unfair & Ugly,” a proposed TV series showing Orange County through a South Asian, Muslim-American lens.
And, they say, it looks a little different.
“Growing up here, we watched shows like ‘The O.C.’ and ‘The Hills,'” Chowdhry said. “It’s all so beautiful and glamorous. But those weren’t the lifestyles we were living.”
Khan and Chowdhry are still looking for takers, but they hope “Unfair & Ugly” will catch the attention of streaming media services such as Netflix or Hulu or a network such as HBO. The trailer for the series was released Tuesday night and Khan and Chowdhry’s media company, Stranger Magic Productions, raised nearly $39,000 on crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
The title of the show, “Unfair & Ugly,” is a play on “Fair & Lovely,” a skin-whitening cream wildly popular in Asian countries where fair skin is valued. In countries such as India where arranged marriages are still the norm, matrimonial ads seeking brides list “fair” as one of the requisites.
These attitudes are rampant in South Asian communities stateside, as well, Chowdhry said.
“There’s this belief that whitening our skin will somehow bring us more opportunities,” she said. “In our natural state as brown people, we are still considered — and consider ourselves — unfair and ugly. So, we lighten ourselves and our identities just to fit in because who we are is not enough.”
Having been surrounded by different cultures in Orange County, from South Asian and Vietnamese to Latino, Khan and Chowdhry decided to make their show about “mundane lives” exploring sensitive subjects such as interracial relationships and gender gaps between immigrants and their children who are born and raised in America.
For example, one of the characters in “Unfair & Ugly,” a South Asian Muslim, introduces his family to his black Muslim girlfriend with mixed results.
“It’s to show that racism divides us all,” Khan said. “We want to create an opportunity for conversation. If we are willing as people of color to talk, it opens the door for everyone else to talk about it with their own families, communities and in their workplaces.”
Mental health stigma is another issue they address, because even talking about mental illness is taboo in these cultures.
“Our main character, Sona, deals with depression,” Chowdhry said. “People in our communities often don’t understand the effects of depression and can be dismissive of it without realizing what the other person is going through.”
Despite the heavy subjects and dramatic situations, expect a generous dose of humor, she said.
“Television is about entertainment, about providing an escape for people,” Chowdhry said. “And people we see every day are funny and deal with life’s challenges with a smile on their faces. People are resilient.”
The scenes shot so far were all filmed in Orange County, said Khan, a graduate of University High School in Irvine. Chowdhry graduated from Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach.
“Orange County is very much our home,” said Chowdhry, who now lives in Jersey City, NJ. “It’s our set for life.”
Khan and Chowdhry said they hope their series and others that have inspired them such as Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” and the “Brown Girls Web Series,” as well as KumailNanjiani’s film “The Big Sick,” will open doors for South Asian actors who have been relegated to playing terrorists, cab drivers and convenience store clerks on screen.
A recent documentary titled “The Problem with Apu” by Hari Kondabolu, a comedian from Queens who is of Indian descent, talked about how the popular convenience store clerk character from “The Simpsons” has helped foster stereotypes.
South Asians and Muslim Americans have been politicized, misrepresented and demeaned for decades in Hollywood and beyond, Chowdhry said.
“What we want to show is the beauty and complex reality of the people around us who are not well represented,” she said. “They need to be shown as part of the fabric of life. So, we are rising up to our responsibility to create the images of us that we want to see on TV.” – Courtesy Orange County Register
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
