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While most people would not even smile when talking about serious issues, a reality show is doing the opposite as they make fun of it. The new show represents ethnic diversity and confronting the controversial topic of race head on.
The said show only premiered last week on the television station TNT, "Druzhba Narodov," or "Friendship of Peoples," got its name from a Soviet slogan that inter-ethnic unity and follows a Moscow household headed by a Dagestani man and his Russian Cossack wife.
The show feature Timur Taniya, is an Abkhazian who become popular because of the popular musical comedy show KVN — and mixed marriages between ethnicities are just natural in Russia, but there is a twist since the new series' Muslimovs are the first sitcom family to portray the life of a mixed ethnic family and makes fun about the daily problem that deal with culture.
The one-liners and fluffy light sitcom music in Druzhba Narodov appears to creating a a startlingly different tone around inter-ethnic relations in contrast with the violence during ethnic riots in the Moscow suburb Biryulyovo last year or repeated scenes of Central Asian men being stopped on the Moscow metro in the run up to the Sochi Olympics. The social network of the show gets mixed comments of support, doubt about the success of the show and, insult against Caucasus natives and nationalist slogans.
However, the producers of the show insisted that there show has nothing to do with nationality. The family represents a society in general, and a positive, uplifting series that works only to raise the consideration between people that have different nationalities.
Though, it is the conservative elements of Russian society that headlines, the show gives at times a surprisingly progressive view of upper-middle class Moscow life. Besides the different nationalities that the show has, the first four episodes include a gay character who works at the Muslimov's dentist office. All the while Jibrail, played by Taniya, acts as the traditional conservative sitcom dad goofily that tries to control his family.
The series' family comes from the last name and life story of its creators, Nina Muslimova and her husband Shaban, who is also the director of the show. The pair, a Lezgin — a person from southern Dagestan — man and Russian Cossack woman, live in Moscow with three children and writes the episode together. Though the real-life Muslimovs don’t have a clinic, the couple noted that most of the situations there come from their lives.
The show's time slot of the show is between two episodes of Russia's most popular sitcom, "Interny" and according to statistics from TNT, the premier was watched by 12.6 percent of viewers ages 14 to 44 during its 8:30 p.m. time and 15.4 percent of 18- to 30-year-olds.
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