Man Like Mobeen follows the life of the titular Mobeen as he spends time with his friends Nate and Eight and, in the absence of their parents, raises his much younger sister, Aqsa, in Small Heath, Birmingham. Mobeen tries to live a good life as a Muslim and ensure his sister reaches her potential while escaping his murky past as a drug dealer.
Background and production
While working as a humanities teacher in a secondary school in Coventry, Guz Khan began making YouTube videos in character as Mobeen, an opinionated care worker who is raising his sister Aqsa. One video reacted to Fox News's suggestion that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims while another went viral after calling for a boycott of Jurassic World due to its use of the word "Pachy" to refer to the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus, as it sounds like the racial slur for people of Pakistani descent, "Paki". Steve Coogan's production companyBaby Cow picked up on Khan's YouTube videos and made a pilot for BBC Three's new talent show, Comedy Feeds. Khan has described the pilot as "very generic, super-sitcomy" and stated that he wanted to make "something more substantial" with Man Like Mobeen. The four part first series, produced by Cave Bear and Tiger Aspect Productions, was announced by BBC Three controller Damian Kavanagh at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival and was released on iPlayer in December of the same year. The show was picked up for a second series of four episodes in September 2018. During filming for the second series' first episode, which deals with knife crime, Khan and other members of the production called an ambulance after seeing a young boy attacked and threatened with a knife. Khan has stated that while waiting for the ambulance he felt that "nothing was more real than the very subject we were filming and talking about". In response to the success of the programme with younger audiences, the BBC announced in March 2019 that a third series of Man Like Mobeen had been commissioned. Scripts for Man Like Mobeen were written by Khan and Andy Milligan, creator of the comedy drama Undercover and script writer for TV presentersAnt & Dec. Khan has stated that he wanted the show to portray "the funny yet complex realities of life for young working classmen and women in Britain today", alongside an authentic account of Birmingham, which he feels "gets almost no positive representation in the media".
Episodes
Series One (2017)
Series Two (2019)
Series Three (2020)
Critical reception
Writing for the Financial Times, Harriet Fitch Little described the first series as "an exceptionally funny character comedy that spins jokes with a subtlety that’s rare for such a young writer". Before the release of the third series in January 2020, the NME's Gary Ryan said that Man Like Mobeen "isn't just one of the funniest sitcoms of recent times – it may also be one of the most important" and described the show as "Only Fools and Horses meets Breaking Bad – a lightning-in-a-bottle sitcom that features flawed-but-loveable characters you enjoy hanging out with, while actually saying something about the world they inhabit".
