Do not come to the new series of Man Like Mobeen cold. What started out in 2017 as a relatively straightforward sitcom about three twentysomething friends who kept inadvertently grazing the criminal underbelly of their corner of inner-city Birmingham is now a violent, convoluted gangster thriller – one whose fifth and final season involves a promised assassination, the Turkish mafia, an Irish mobster, a prison doctor who is really the evil daughter of a drug kingpin, a kidnapped sister, millions in unlaundered cash and a tea shop. The action will be practically incomprehensible to the uninitiated – and pretty hard to follow even for the faithful.
Is it worth starting from the beginning? That depends. On the one hand, Man Like Mobeen does feel like an objectively valuable comic enterprise. Creator and star Guz Khan – who left his teaching job after going viral on YouTube as Mobeen, a mouthy Brummie Muslim and the prototype for this sitcom’s titular protagonist (one video saw him outraged at an apparently racist dinosaur in 2015’s Jurassic World) – is a natural clown, and uses his funny bones to power a series that immerses us in a community rarely seen on screen. As a depiction of a specific kind of British Muslim experience – working class, Midlands based – Man Like Mobeen is refreshingly rambunctious and gratifyingly uncompromising. All good sitcoms have their own vernacular; this one has the self-assurance to literally speak a different language: characters tend to slip into Urdu and Punjabi without translation. Meanwhile, racism and Islamophobia are turned into running jokes by combining irreverence with a tireless dedication to rubbishing stereotypes.
