NPR questions why Marlee Matlin's "My Deaf Family" isn't on TV

From Linda Holmes at NPR:

It took me a couple of weeks to get around to watching the ten-minute pilot episode of Marlee Matlin's new show, My Deaf Family. As she recently explained to The Los Angeles Times, Matlin shopped around the idea of a reality show about a hearing/deaf family, and while networks purported to think it was a great idea, they weren't sure they could pull it off logistically, because of the signing and the subtitles. Undeterred, she decided on a direct approach and posted it on YouTube.

If, indeed, the concern was that people couldn't handle the subtitles, it's nonsense. Absolute, utter nonsense. If people will watch all the subtitled Korean on Lost, and all the subtitled Na'vi in Avatar, they will do perfectly fine with the subtitled signing in My Deaf Family. Furthermore, as Matlin points out in the L.A. Times piece, people who watch reality shows get subtitled dialogue all the time, when people are too quiet, mumbly, drowned out or drunk to be understood.

Meanwhile, you'd get a show that is, based on the pilot, exactly what I like in unscripted shows: a window into everyday details of something a lot of people aren't familiar with.

This is why job shows like Deadliest Catch can work: people tend to take an interest in unfamiliar details about how other people live, and those details do not, contrary to popular belief, need to be salacious. If everybody knew what it was like to work on a crab boat, nobody would watch Deadliest Catch. But the second I saw the mom in My Deaf Family ordering pizza via video relay -- something I simply had absolutely no idea people did -- I thought, "This is a show that I would watch."

Fortunately, it's not a perfect family -- Mom hovers over her teenage son, and I admit that I cringed at the fact that she keeps taking her eyes off the road while she's driving, because she's signing a conversation with him. The show wasn't produced to make them look particularly heroic. But their perspectives are very interesting, and 15-year-old Jared -- one of two hearing kids in a family where the other two kids and both parents are deaf -- serves as one of the chief narrators and is an appealing, accessible, obviously insightful kid. According to Matlin, they shot this in a day and a half. There's clearly plenty of material.

Get it on TV, somebody. People will find it, and frankly, I'd really like to have an opportunity to watch more of it myself. To use Matlin's own comparison, if they watch Little People, Big World -- which has run for five seasons on TLC -- they will watch this. It's another in a well-established line of shows about families in special situations, and while some of those shows stink, some of them are entertaining and thought-provoking, and I think this has the potential to be the latter.