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PASADENA, Calif. — NBC's Growing Up Fisher is another family comedy, but there's a difference: the father, Mel Fisher (J.K. Simmons), is blind (pictured).
It's not arbitrary. Fisher,
which premieres following Olympics coverage on Feb. 23 (10:30 p.m.
ET/PT), is based on the childhood of series creator DJ Nash. It moves to
its regular Tuesday slot (9:30 p.m. ET/PT) on Feb. 25.
"My dad
went blind when he was 11 and hid his blindness (to) pretty much
everyone outside the family" until he and his wife divorced and he got a
guide dog, Nash said Sunday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. A scene where the father cuts down a tree with a chainsaw is based on his own experiences.
Fisher's premise is not a gimmick, said executive producer Jason Bateman, who provides the voiceover for Mel's son, Henry, looking back on his youth. "It's his true story. Cynicism, be gone," he said.
The show, which is set in the present day, looks at the Fisher family after Mel and his wife, Joyce (Jenna Elfman), decide to divorce. They remain "amazing parents" to teenage daughter Katie (Ava Deluca-Verley) and 11-year-old son Henry (Eli Baker).
There were challenges to the situation at the time, Nash said, but "looking back, I wouldn't change a thing."
Simmons,
who is not blind, said he had help from Nash, a visually impaired
consultant and another consultant in learning how to play a man who
can't see.
"Your whole life is naturally fixed on picked-up
movement, so it's a simple case of throwing your eyes out of focus," he
said. "The main things I learned (were) all the other bits of behavior,
how you handle things, what you do with your hands, how you interact
physically with other people."
Although Mel's blindness may stand
out initially, Nash said that's only one aspect of the character's
personality and one element of the family's story.
Some viewers
may "see the first thing about Mel is that he's blind. My dad being
blind is like the 17th thing wrong with him. He's stubborn. He hugs too
much. He's a lawyer. There's a lot of craziness going on over there," he
said. "I don't want this to be every visually impaired person's story.
... We're trying to tell Henry's perspective of what that was like and
how it informs who he is as a father today."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
