Afghan TV plans to air "Shereen's Law", a controversial feminist TV drama sometime before the end of the year. The show creates big news in Afghanistan as it is a production based on female empowerment.
The shows on going against a number of norms for Afghan woman. For starters, the main character Shereen is a middle-aged working single parent of three children. That itself shows shock in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society where most woman take part in a solely domestic life. According to director and writer Max Walker, the show will display women fighting against corruption, harassment, rape, and forced marriage. What is significant about the show is that it is a portrayal of the daily lives of woman in Afghanistan. Woman will be able to connect to Shereen as her struggles in the storyline will be similar to the woman watching the television screen. "It is the first such drama -- that is about women, that is about empowering women, that is about the struggles of women in Afghanistan," Leena Alam, the Afghan actress who plays Shereen, told AFP.
Of course when filming a show that attacks federal corruption in the judicial system the actors have to be a bit weary about the people who oppose the production. A few actors even jumped ship due to the extremity of the storyline. One example was a woman playing the lawyer friend of Shereen. The woman was forced to leave the show because her husband was unhappy with her act.
The show is looked upon as guidance for Afghan woman to become more involved in empowering themselves. Television has come to play a huge role in Afghanistan, as 58% of Afghans own a television set, according to the Asia Foundation development organization. Also being that the show is based on actual events that occur to Afghan woman, many will see it as a reality check, hopefully keeping women aware of the oppression they face. For example, a woman was stoned to death in the center of Kabul in broad daylight last week because of her allegedly burning a copy of the Quran.
The 12 45-minute episodes are being made by the Tolo television channel, one of the big successes of Afghanistan's new media scene, largely funded by foreign donors when it was launched in 2004. The Moby group, which owns Tolo believes that they have a important role in this as well, since they are the first Afghan channel to have both female and male presenters alongside each other in a show. "You have to cross the barriers sometimes and you have to do something where you give the voice to the women," Moby's director of programming Massoud Sanjer told AFP.
It will be very interesting to see the numbers this show generates when it finally airs. It may also be frightening to hear about the controversy this show may bring to Afghan society. However, if it can change the way men think of women and their role in Afghan society, then the show will have proved to be more successful than any amount of views or numbers can show.