Man Like Mobeen
A reformed drug dealer navigates family and community in Birmingham.
Set in Birmingham's Small Heath, the BBC Three series Man Like Mobeen follows a former drug dealer trying to live right as a Muslim while raising his younger sister Aqsa. Created by Guz Khan and Andy Milligan, the comedy-drama stars Khan as Mobeen. Premiering on 17 December 2017, it earned praise for its relatable characters and its portrayal of working-class West Midlands life and British Pakistani-Muslim culture.
Quick Facts
- Genre
- Comedy-drama
- Creator
- Guz Khan; Andy Milligan
- Director
- Ollie Parsons (series 1–3)
- Akaash Meeda (series 4)
- David Sant (series 5)
- Starring
- Guz Khan
- Tolu Ogunmefun
- Tez Ilyas
- Duaa Karim
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Series
- 5
- Episodes
- 23
Facts from the source article.
Cast
Guz Khan plays Mobeen Deen, a man who used to deal drugs but has turned his life around, now looking after his younger sister and working to make his neighbourhood better. Yousef Naseer takes on the role of Mobeen in his younger days. Tolu Ogunmefun is Nate, Mobeen’s best mate and the one who always has his back, with Timi Akinyosade playing a younger version of Nate. Tez Ilyas, appearing in the first three series, is Arslan “Eight” Mughal, a good friend to both Mobeen and Nate and part of the close-knit group that acts as family for Aqsa; Zain Rahman portrays Eight as a kid. Dúaa Karim plays Aqsa, Mobeen’s sister, who often gets fed up with him but still loves and admires him. Mark Silcox is Mohammed “Uncle Shady” Shah Shaheed, a loud and cruel figure in the area who nonetheless sides with Mobeen and his crew. Perry Fitzpatrick plays Barney Harper, a cop who keeps running into Mobeen. The rest of the cast includes Salman Akhtar as Sajid, Asheq Akhtar as Uncle Ahmed, David Avery as Cal, Art Malik as Uncle Khan, Jaykae as Azaar, Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Miss Aitken, Korkmaz Arslan as Emre, Nikesh Patel as Naveed and Iqbal, Kane Brown as the Hood Whisperer, Janice Connolly as Governor Burn, Yousef Kerkour as Megalodon, Specs Gonzalez as Chippy, Al Roberts as Memory Stick, Hussina Raja as Nida, and David Pearse as Jerry.
Production
Before he was a TV star, Guz Khan was a humanities teacher in Coventry who started making YouTube videos as Mobeen, a blunt care worker looking after his younger sister Aqsa. One of those videos took aim at Fox News for claiming Birmingham was a no-go zone for non-Muslims. Another went viral when it called for a boycott of Jurassic World because the film used "Pachy" as a nickname for the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus—a Cretaceous herbivore from what is now Baluchistan—since it sounded too close to "Paki," a racial slur for people of Pakistani descent. Steve Coogan's company Baby Cow noticed Khan's online work and produced a pilot for BBC Three's Comedy Feeds. Khan later called that pilot "very generic, super-sitcomy" and said he wanted Man Like Mobeen to be "something more substantial." The first series, four episodes long, was made by Cave Bear and Tiger Aspect Productions, announced by BBC Three controller Damian Kavanagh at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival, and dropped on iPlayer that December. A second four-episode series was ordered in September 2018. While filming its first episode—which deals with knife crime—Khan and the crew saw a young boy being attacked and threatened with a knife and called an ambulance. Khan said that while waiting, "nothing was more real than the very subject we were filming and talking about." A third series was commissioned in March 2019 and aired in 2020, a fourth was confirmed in September 2020 and started airing in June 2023, and a fifth and final series was announced in February 2024, airing on 1 May 2025. The scripts were written by Khan and Andy Milligan, who created the comedy drama Undercover and has written for Ant & Dec. Khan wanted the show to capture "the funny yet complex realities of life for young working class men and women in Britain today" and to give an honest picture of Birmingham, a city he believes "gets almost no positive representation in the media."
Critical reception
Harriet Fitch Little of the Financial Times 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 third series release in January 2020, NME's Gary Ryan said 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 it 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".
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