'Baghdad Central' takes on TV's worst Arab stereotypes. Even its cast was 'shocked'

A piano plays a minor-key waltz as the slouching silhouette of Muhsin Khafaji, a disgraced detective, walks up a dilapidated alleyway. So opens "Baghdad Central," a six-part police serial produced by Hulu and Britain's Channel 4, with the Iraqi capital sometime after 2003 as its backdrop.

Saddam is gone. In his stead, the Americans have come, the British too, sallying into the treacherous sands of post-invasion Iraq to remake a nation in their own image - no matter what Iraqis want - and make some money along the way.

Enmeshed in their plans is Khafaji (ably played by Waleed Zuaiter), a one-time Iraqi police inspector in Saddam's regime. Initially suspected of being an insurgent, he's recruited to work with British and U.S. officials in the Coalition Authority