Man Like Mobeen, review: this final series remains culturally authentic

Telegraph

01-05-2025

The launch of the fifth and final series of the comedy Man Like Mobeen (BBC Three) is, at the very least, a reminder to go back and watch the other four. This is a perfect example of how low-budget, very British, small-scale sitcom can still work in the age of bottomless-pocketed streamers and truncated attention spans.
I say it 'can' work. Depending on what you read, Man Like Mobeen has either been cruelly 'axed' by the BBC or star and creator Guz Khan doesn't want to do any more. So you could say it doesn't work. Either way, on this evidence, its demise is a crying shame. The new series (which, without wishing to give the game away, does feel valedictory) is an intensely likeable and very funny exercise in building characters and then having them make the same mistakes again and again. And that is the very essence of sitcom.
For newbies, the show follows former drug dealer Mobeen (Khan) as he struggles to escape his past and raise his beloved little sister Aqsa in among the Muslim community in Smallheath, Birmingham. At the end of the last series, nearly two years ago, Mobeen was stabbed... but we knew then that he wasn't dead. Aqsa, we also knew, was somehow in Sharjah taking a job interview with Mobeen's nemesis Uncle Khan (Art Malik, having the time of his professional life).
Series five is thus a simple exercise in closing the circle – Mobeen's mission is to find Aqsa and get her back. All the plotlines stem from that spine and its simplicity gives the series an action-thriller's momentum. Of course the joy (one of the joys) of Man Like Mobeen is it would never claim to be anything as highfalutin' as an action-thriller. Indeed, it would never claim to be anything, really, other than a series of larks and your-mum gags.
Nevertheless, the Find Aqsa plot is cleverly handled, dotted judiciously amongst the daft set pieces to the point where the show has become moreish. It's also still very funny. Some of the smaller roles – Mark Silcox as Uncle Shady (because no one throws shade like Uncle Shady); Salman Akhtar as Saj – have been honed to comedic perfection over multiple episodes. By now, they really don't have to do or say very much to have an audience in stitches. Even so, Saj's rap in episode two or Shady's newfound moustache obsession are straight-to-meme brilliant.
Man Like Mobeen has always been lauded for its cultural authenticity: it's a story of young Muslim men that doesn't feel like it was honed by all-white executives who wouldn't touch Muslim Birmingham with a Zoom call. But it's worth pointing out that authenticity is a term that's usually applied to drama. If MLM is indeed done, its legacy will have been to show how, actually, the essence of authentic culture often lies in comedy – the stupid things people say and the way they josh and rib one another. For a show that has been reliably funny from first to last, that's a serious achievement.