From the intro to the story by Allen Rucker in New Mobility magazine. The article also includes a sidebar Q&A with actress Teal Sherer (pictured). Full disclosure: I am quoted in the article.If you are trying to make some sense of how people with disabilities are faring in American media these days, your lying eyes are about all you have to go on. There have been academic studies about this, most notably one commissioned by the Screen Actors Guild in 2005 that reported actors with disabilities were "woefully underrepresented in the entertainment industry and face unique barriers ... due to perceived discrimination and lack of accommodation." One stat quoted in the study was especially ugly: namely, that less than .5 of 1 percent of characters with disabilities on television had speaking parts —.5 percent. This pathetic number has fueled the wrath of disability advocates for years. But sometimes statistics, like eyes, can lie, or at least distort the evidence. My own eyes tell me that there are many more characters with disabilities showing up on TV, film, ads and the Internet, in all kinds of weird and unpredictable ways. Yes, things are changing.
That SAG study — conducted by noted researchers Olivia Raynor and Katherine Hayward of UCLA's National Arts and Disability Center — is now a few years old in terms of TV and film trends. Today the networks are scrambling to find anything to maintain market share, from borrowing hit shows like The Office and American Idol from Britain to putting Jay Leno in prime time. Cable programming, post-Sopranos, is much more adventurous. Let's see, there's a hit show on cable right now about a woman who sells marijuana, and another about a guy who sells meth, and another about a guy who's a serial killer, not to mention the old standby, Monk, a detective with — what, a disability! — obsessive-compulsive disorder. Oh, yeah, the guy who sells meth, the great Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad, also has a son with cerebral palsy, played by an actor who actually has CP, RJ Mitte. Just a couple of token instances, right, a small blip on the big radar of American media? Granted, disability inclusion is still a fringe phenomenon, and given the glut of current programming, the occurrences might not make that much of a statistical difference, but then again, all of cable was fringe TV until The Sopranos started drawing 13-14 million people to HBO on a given Sunday night to watch an overweight family man/sociopath with pork issues. And the fringe has a way of creeping into the mainstream.
Case in point: The Office. The original UK Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant version, all 12 episodes and a two-part Christmas special, was originally a cult show in the United States. It spread largely by word of mouth and caught up with a lot of hip comedy lovers via DVD. If you watch the second six shows of the original, you'll notice that one of the regular characters is Brenda, a wheelchair user who joins the office when it is forced to merge with another branch. David Brent (Ricky Gervais) and his numbskull assistant, Gareth, have no idea how to act around such a person. At one point, Gareth tries to carry Brenda down a flight of stairs during a fire drill and ends up abandoning her halfway down. David is just painfully offensive. Here's one of his typical remarks: "If you have lost both legs and both arms, just go, 'At least I'm not dead.' Though I'd rather be dead in that situation to be honest ... but I'm not saying people like that should be put down." Having a great sense of humor is a plus for actor Tracy Ashton, who plays Didi the one legged girl on NBC's hit show, My Name is Earl.You get the idea. When the series came to NBC — now with 9 million viewers a week — Brenda didn't make the trip, but the sensibility of the original show did. In the second season of the American Office, Michael the manager (Steve Carell) burns his foot on a George Foreman grill, whines that the staff doesn't get his "disability," then brings in a real wheelchair user (played by real-life gimp Marcus York) to explain things. York's character, quickly disgusted, leaves after one of Michael's many offensive remarks. Blame it on the Brits, I say. If you've watched Extras, the HBO series by the same creators, you know that it abounds in disability humor. In one episode Andy, the Ricky Gervais character, can't believe a dwarf actor has such a hot girlfriend, and when the dwarf comes after him for flirting with her, Andy knee-drops him out cold. In another major story line, Andy, now a big sitcom star, egregiously offends the mother of a child with Down syndrome in a fancy restaurant — he's talking too loud for Andy — and becomes a media pariah because of it. In past American TV, it would be rare for a kid with Down syndrome to be seen eating out, let alone be seen as the inciting figure in a story line.
