For the disabled, representation in television, film matters
After canceling the ABC comedy “Speechless” after three seasons, the network’s entertainment head Karey Burke said this week that it was “not without great, great, gut-wrenching consideration that we ultimately made that call,” adding that “there was a lot of anguish for me and all of us at ABC.”
It’s a statement that leaves the same weird aftertaste as the recent explanation from Netflix when it canceled “One Day at a Time,” one of the very few TV series created by and centering on Latinx stories.
Similarly, “Speechless” was the rare network comedy starring a disabled actor — Micah Fowler — playing a disabled character, a droll high schooler named JJ. The show’s absence on the schedule next year is a loss not only because it was so smart and funny, but also because there aren’t any current or new series on the broadcast schedule that prominently feature a disabled actor.
Only 2% of characters this past TV season had disabilities (including “invisible” disabilities such as depression, anxiety, cancer, epilepsy, diabetes and autism). That’s 18 regularly appearing characters out of 857 — and most of those roles were not played by disabled actors. The numbers aren’t much different when you look at film. “I believe that Hollywood so far really doesn’t understand the breadth of disability and why it makes sense to include issues around disability in programming,” longtime activist Judith E. Heumann told me. She is a wheelchair user based in Washington, D.C., and led a protest in 1977 that eventually paved the way for the Americans With Disabilities Act.
“Diversity is in the zeitgeist and disability is being left out of the conversation,” she writes in a new report for the Ford Foundation called “Road Map for Inclusion: Changing the Face of Disability in Media.” Between 20%-25% of Americans — nearly 40 million — are disabled and they should be “represented proportionally in front of and behind the camera.”
TV and film are supposed to reflect our lives back to us. Why limit the stories you could potentially tell? Hollywood is all but telling the disabled community: You don’t exist.
I asked Heumann about the ongoing reticence from studios and networks and producers. “I think it’s because disability is something many people are still fearful of,” she said.
The Netflix comedy “Special,” which premiered last month, is written by and stars Ryan O’Connell (who has cerebral palsy), and the first episode opens with a scene that skewers this fear brilliantly: O’Connell’s character is walking down the sidewalk, loses his balance and falls. A kid nearby asks if he’s OK and points out that he’s walking funny, he should go to the hospital. No, O’Connell explains, I have cerebral palsy — and explains what that means. The kid’s response? To scream and run in the opposite direction.
“People tend to think about disability in the most negative and dramatic ways when really you want people to understand the dayto-day realities of what goes on in our lives,” Heumann said, “and it’s anything from excellent to terrible, just like anybody else.” Aging, she pointed out, means many of us will acquire one or more disabilities, including difficulties with walking, seeing, hearing or comprehension.
Michael Patrick Thornton, who played Dr. Gabriel Fife on “Private Practice” for two seasons, is a Chicago-based actor and the cofounder and artistic director of The Gift Theatre in Jefferson Park. He has been a wheelchair user since a lifethreatening spinal stroke in 2003, and can be seen opposite Noel Fisher on the CBS drama “The Red Line,” which airs its final two episodes Sunday.
Why does he think there’s such a paucity of disabled representation in TV and film? “One theory I have is that we have an entire town (Hollywood) built on the idea of immortality and invincibility and we’re never going to age. And I think we have a very perverse relationship to the body in the American culture. So if you’re someone for whom a healthy body is the absolute articulation of your identity, then disability is probably going to scare you. So I think there are these kind of perverse virtues that are smuggled in through film and television: This is what a person should look like, this is what a person should sound like. They’re these tropes we’ve inherited and I think for a lot of able-bodied people, disability is a way too uncomfortable reminder of the fragility of life and the fragility of their own body, so they kind of actively exclude it from the cool kids club, meaning TV and film.”
Thornton shared one experience he had when auditioning. “I go in for a character who’s identified as a wheelchair user, do the audition, do a call-back or or two — and then I lose the job to an actor who doesn’t use a wheelchair. And then beyond that, hearing through the grapevine that some producer was like (in reference to why they didn’t hire Thornton): ‘Yeah, but he uses a wheelchair!’ I think there’s a perverse magnanimity — that they think they’re doing you a favor by not hiring you because they’re like: It’s going to be a really long shoot and you’ll have to be in Romania for a certain amount of time and then the project moves to the Sahara and it’s just going to be a real drag on you. They make these kinds of assumptions. So then it’s like, why did you even pretend to make the effort of being interested in seeing what this community can do?”