Netflix faces an unusual foe in telling a good story about the Arab World – Hollywood itself

If Netflix is serious about a series based in the modern Middle East, it will have to face a deeply conservative culture: Hollywood itself. By Faisal Al Yafai

Could a prison series like "Orange is the New Black" be made about the Middle East? (JoJo Whilden/Netflix via AP, File)

Back in December, the chief content officer for Netflix, Ted Sarandos, told the Dubai International Film Festival that he was looking for stories about modern life in the region.

“I think what's missing on the global stage is a really great series about contemporary life in the Middle East,” he said. “Most depictions of life are either historical or almost caricatures.”

Mr Sarandos is right. But changing that will mean breaking through what is a very conservative culture. Depictions of the Middle East always struggle to escape from a conservative mindset that governs what can and can't be shown on television. And I'm not talking about a conservative culture among Arabs. I'm speaking of Hollywood.

English-language television is going through something of a golden age. US cable networks and international streaming services mean there are more outlets than ever before but also more ways for people to consume content. As Hollywood's movie industry seeks safety in remakes, reboots and never-ending sequels, TV has become the place where experiments can take place.

But the people who write, produce, commission and direct television are still a deeply conservative class. (In social terms; their politics are to the left of the spectrum.) They are drawn from an extremely narrow range of backgrounds and life experiences. They are predominantly white, male, middle class, American – and have spent much of their life inside the Hollywood machine. Their experience of life beyond television – and certainly beyond the United States – is limited.

That makes it hard for writers and producers to accurately reflect the reality of other communities. Their prejudices about the world get passed on to the work.

A film about, say, African-Americans or working class families gets refracted through the prism of what Hollywood thinks those groups are like – and that received wisdom itself comes from film, television and even news made by people just like them.

The result is that what stories are selected, how they are told and packaged bears little resemblance to the real life experiences of these groups. The rare accurate portrayal that gets through is drowned in a sea of stereotypes.

If that is the case for American life, how much greater is the challenge with foreign countries, distanced by language and geography?

Depicting the Arab world seems to be especially problematic for makers of film and television. Writers and directors can't seem to get past the differences.

The Middle East is endlessly exotic to filmmakers today, as it was to European painters 200 years ago. These filmmakers cannot see past the exotic – they see what is unique to the region and assume it is common.

The same mentality that led European painters to fixate on the religious rituals of Islam (because those were so different from Christian rituals) is apparent today in the use of hijabs and mosques to set the scene in the Middle East. What is different becomes defining.

But good fiction is about commonalities. The tensions and traumas of relationships, family and working life are the same everywhere.

Still, American makers of film and television consistently offer their audiences the same stories, patronising their audiences by apparently thinking no one will believe a series set in the Middle East without the clichéd struggle of a hijab-clad woman against her domineering father.

(Women of the Middle East, don't despair: Hollywood can't portray the rich tapestry of female life in America, either.)

Caught between their limited experience of the world, and the gaze of the expectations of the public, creativity is stifled. Screenwriters can't write what they need to write, directors can't direct what they see around them. The producer in Los Angeles is always going to choose the story of the devout homemaker in Cairo over the athlete in Amman or the entrepreneur in Dubai.

Until the culture in Hollywood is changed, with more and different voices in the industry, and the Arab world starts producing English-language content (or translating the excellent Arabic content it already produces), it will be hard for genuinely gripping drama about the Middle East to emerge.

For now, a conservative industry is more comfortable telling tales of galaxies far, far away than those of people outside a narrow, familiar strip of life here on Earth.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai