Disabilities featured in some new series

“How can you hit a man in my condition?” Michael J. Fox complains when his television daughter gives him a playful smack on the arm in the premiere of “The Michael J. Fox Show.”

He might as well be saying it to the viewing audience, not as banter but as a gentle taunt.

“My condition,” for Fox, is Parkinson’s disease, and his new series, which has its premiere on Sept. 26 on NBC, doesn’t just work it into the show. It basically makes a character out of it. Several series in the new season continue the welcome advance of characters with disabilities or severe medical conditions on television, but “The Michael J. Fox Show” takes things to a different level. It’s a fictional series wrapped in Fox’s personal reality show.

With our natural tendency to want to feel as if we’re part of something groundbreaking, it’s easy to forget that characters with disabilities have been turning up on television for a long time. That is underscored this season with a new version of “Ironside,” a series about a detective who is in a wheelchair, which arrives on NBC on Oct. 2. The original “Ironside,” starring Raymond Burr, made its debut almost half a century ago, in 1967.

Since then, television has brought us blind investigators (“Longstreet” in 1971, “Blind Justice,” in 2005) and a “defective detective” with obsessive-compulsive disorder (“Monk” in 2002), not to mention a paralyzed convict (Augustus Hill on “Oz” in 1997). Mary Ingalls lost her sight in “Little House on the Prairie” back in 1978.

And Fox is far from being the first actor with a disability or serious medical condition to play a character with that challenge on television. Jim Byrnes, a double amputee, was a featured player on “Wiseguy” in the 1980s and “Highlander” in the 1990s, among many other credits. Chris Burke, who has Down syndrome, played a son with that condition on “Life Goes On,” a domestic comedy that ran for four seasons beginning in 1989.

When Dana Elcar, an actor on “MacGyver,” developed glaucoma and began to lose his sight in the early 1990s, the series had his character experience the same thing. On AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” RJ Mitte, who has cerebral palsy, portrays Walter White Jr., who has that condition.

Most actors do not have the disabilities they’re portraying, something true of Kevin McHale ( Artie on “Glee,”) DJ Qualls ( Billy on “Legit”) and others. Advocacy groups continue to complain that few such roles go to those with the impairment being depicted.