From CJR Daily:

Adel, the rock star of the three, with his big black shades, spiky hair, and goatee, looks at the camera and describes how his date went last night. “The vast majority of girls will not allow you to get where you want,” he says coyly. We hear you, brother. But then he stops, considering the girl and the evening, and says, “It’s not cool when you’re on a date and explosions happen.” Then we cut to Saif, the stoner, usually in a wife-beater and clutching a hookah, just about to talk about what premarital sex is like, when a helicopter swoops down low and drowns out all sound. “American choppers make such a noise…” he yells and sits back in his lawn chair, smiling.

Where are we? Well, Baghdad it seems. But this is Baghdad thrown into an MTV blender and served in a glass with a cocktail umbrella.

The Los Angeles Times reported today on a new Internet sensation, “Hometown Baghdad,” a series made up of two-minute segments that chronicle the lives of three young men (Ausama, Saif, and Adel) trying to live normal lives in Iraq - the producers intended to include a woman but the logistics were too difficult. Filmed by Iraqis in what we imagine to be very dangerous circumstances, and then edited in New York, the short films are a remarkably complex look at life in Baghdad. There is a certain kind of unexpected normalcy to the three men’s lives. They have dinner with their families, hang out with friends, date. But there is always the constant reminder that they are living in a war zone, or, as Saif describes it, “hell.”

. . .

Unfortunately, it seems Chat the Planet had to turn to the Internet to gain viewers for these stories because the television networks it initially approached turned it down, claiming that the idea for the show was too depressing and that Americans were anyway far too saturated with news from Iraq.

. . .

Now, with millions of viewers online, those same dismissive television executives are beating down the doors of the creators of “Hometown Baghdad” to get a piece of it. Figures.