CULTURE: We Need a Muslim Brady Bunch?

Katie Couric floated the idea of a Muslim Cosby Show a while back, and Firoozeh Dumas thinks the notion of "sitcom diplomacy" is a great idea. When she and her family moved here from Iran in 1972, "the first Americans I met were the Bradys and the Partridges," she writes in the Los Angeles Times. The big lesson: Underneath the superficial stuff, American and Iranian families are pretty much the same.

When she lectures around the country, Dumas often gets two reactions: "fear and surprise," she writes. "Fear of Middle Eastern immigrants, and surprise that I am nothing like the person they expected." The problem is that the mutterings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and company have given Iranian Americans "a PR challenge worthy of Sisyphus." A sitcom can only help make one point clear: "Middle Easterners come in all shapes, sizes and belief levels, just like every other kind of American."