July 11, 2014
The Islamic Republic may complain bitterly about the American cultural invasion and all its movies and television programs, but that hasn’t stopped Iranian state broadcasting from lifting a popular American TV program and remaking it in Farsi scene-by-scene.
The program is “Modern Family,” which first appeared on the ABC network in the fall of 2009 and is now in its sixth season.
The American comedy is made in mock documentary style, with the characters in the three interacting families often talking straight into the camera.
Iranian TV has copied the show—not just the theme and the characters, but often duplicating the program scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot.
The Iranian series is titled “Haft Sang” (Seven Stones, the name of an Iranian children’s game). It has changed only one major element of the original US program—the gay couple, Mitchell Pritchett and Cameron Tucker, are not in the Iranian version. Cam and Mitchell have been erased and replaced with an Iranian heterosexual couple.
Brian Lowry, of Variety, the entertainment industry daily, summed up the original US show by writing: “Flitting among three storylines, it’s smart, nimble and best of all, funny, while actually making a point about the evolving nature of what constitutes ‘family’.”
That makes its appropriation by Iranian state television curious, to say the least. In official state dogma, the America idea of family is stamped as evil and the idea that the nature of the family might evolve over time is seen as threatening to religion.
Why state television has chosen to lift “Modern Family” thus remains unclear. It is possible that the authorities at state broadcasting do not know that “Haft Sang” is a copy of an American program. And it is possible that the Iranian producers are producing not just a program but also an enormous joke at the expense of state dogma.
The idea that an American comedy about family life would have appeal in the Islamic Republic suggests that the Iranian and American cultures are not so vastly different as state propaganda asserts. “Haft Sang” is, in that sense, a sharp attack on state dogma.
Iran is free to copy whatever it wants from foreign media because it has never joined the International Copyright Convention, either under the monarchy or under the Islamic Republic. But if Iran ever joins the World Trade Organization (WTO), it will have to join the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which has taken over the copyright convention.
ABC is selling “Modern Family” to other countries to be translated and adapted. Chile already airs “Familia Moderna” and Greece screens “Moderna Oikogeneia.”
“Haft Sang” is produced by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, which programs eight national television channels and commissions roughly 5,000 hours of television content every year, an enormous quantity.
“Haft Sang” drew attention in the West this past week when a video from it was posted to YouTube by Sina Haghighi.
Slate magazine approached Haghighi, a professional video editor in Iran, who provided further details about the show’s characters and its origins.
According to Haghighi, “Haft Sang” is part of state TV’s Ramadan programming. Such series typically run for 30 episodes—all of them having an “ethical theme” of some sort.
The first “Haft Sang” episode aired the first day of Ramadan. The first episodes were nearly exact recreations of “Modern Family’s” initial episodes in 2009.
Haghighi counts the ABC original as his and his wife’s “favorite American show,” so he quickly noticed the similarities—as well as the differences: The Iranian episodes are twice as long as the American version, around 40-to-50 minutes each, yet they lack some of the original’s subplots (such as Manny’s crush on an older girl and Jay dressing up to look younger), making for a much more slowly paced show.
Phil and Claire are now Mohsen and Leila; children Luke and Alex are Shaahin and Shadi. Haghighi said the latter actually resembles the actress who plays Alex, save for the addition of a headscarf.
The gay couple, Mitchell and Cam, are now Behrooz and Elham, a husband and wife who are unable to have children due to Behrooz’s infertility. This explains why the couple has adopted a child in the first episode, as did Cam and Mitchell.
