Tom Brogan

Playwright, attorney, new media journalist and consultant Wajahat Ali writes in The Atlantic about his experiences of writing a Muslim-American cop show for HBO alongside Dave Eggers.

"In hindsight, we believe HBO wanted MJ to be “Homeland–meets-The Cosby Show,” but we can’t be sure. They definitely didn’t want “The Wire with Muslims” and they told us that from the beginning. They had no interest in re-treading old ground and we had no interest in duplicating someone else’s narrative. What we did know was that we didn’t want MJ to explore the similar “find the terrorist” national-security terrain of Homeland and 24. Both of those shows had already excelled in that genre."