Lowe’s has found itself at the center of controversy after announcing that it was pulling its advertising from TLC’s “All-American Muslim.”

After a group called the Florida Family Association launched a campaign against the show, Lowe’s cancelled its advertising, saying the show had become too much of a lightning rod.

“We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, across our workforce and our customers, and we're proud of that longstanding commitment,” the company said in a post on its Facebook page. “Lowe's has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views.”

The decision prompted an immediate outcry from people accusing the company of giving in to bigotry.

In its Facebook post, Lowe’s acknowledged that its effort to avoid a controversy seemed to have backfired.

“It appears that we managed to step into a hotly contested debate with  strong views from virtually every angle and perspective — social, political and otherwise — and we’ve managed to make some people very unhappy,” the post read. “We are sincerely sorry.”

Another company that has acknowledged a decision to stop advertising on the show is the travel website Kayak. Kayak’s chief marketing officer, Robert Birge, acknowledged that the company had gotten some angry emails concerning its sponsorship of the show.

“I watched the first two episodes,” he wrote on Kayak’s corporate blog. “Mostly, I just thought the show sucked.”

Birge accused TLC of misleading his company about the show.

“We believe TLC went out of their way to pick a fight on this, and they didn’t let us know their intentions,” he wrote. “That’s not a business practice that generally gets repeat business from us.”

The company’s chief executive officer and co-founder, Steve Hafner, weighed in the next day.

“We do try to avoid advertising on shows that might produce controversy, whether we support the content or not,” Hafner wrote. “We simply don’t want people to confuse our choice of where we spend our TV dollars with a political or moral agenda.”

Some have suggested that the controversy might actually boost the show’s ratings. At least so far, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

“All-American Muslim” debuted Nov. 13 with more than 1.7 million viewers. Last week, even after the controversy, the show was down to fewer than 1 million viewers.

One of those viewers, at least for part of the show, was me. I wanted to see what was creating all the controversy.

Honestly, though, I found myself agreeing with Comedy Central’s John Stewart, who weighed in during Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Daily Show.”

Based on the outrage, Stewart said, he had assumed the show must feature “jihadi propoganda.” Instead, he said, it seemed to focus on average people doing pretty average things. He played a clip of a young father-to-be talking about his wife’s pregnancy.

“Seriously,” Stewart said after the clip had ended, “that wouldn’t have been interesting to hear even if that guy was building a bomb as he was talking.”

The point of the show seems admirable. It’s intended to illustrate that most American Muslims go through life pretty much like everyone else.

They go to football games, they work at typical jobs and they have families with typical problems.

The problem is that most folks don’t make particularly exciting TV.

Showing average people doing average things just isn’t going to do much to boost ratings.

About 30 people gathered outside a Lowe’s store in Paterson, N.J., on Friday to protest the company’s decision to pull its ads. The comment by one of them, Ahmad Tamimi, was revealing.

“We don’t even watch the show,” he said. “It’s about a multi-million corporation that is going against what America is about.”

If the company had only held out for a few weeks, “All-American Muslim” might have faded away on its own.

• Kelly Hawes is managing editor of the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached at 574-732-5155 or kelly.hawes@pharostribune.com.