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Disney+ is finalizing deals to put in development comedy series Life and Deaf, starring and executive produced by Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, Deadline reports. The project hails from Switched at Birth creator Lizzy Weiss, Patricia Heaton and David Hunt’s Four Boys Entertainment and CBS TV Studios, where Four Boys is under a pod deal.
Written By Weiss and based on the life of Jack Jason, Matlin’s long-time interpreter, Life and Deaf is a half-hour family comedy about a kid growing up in the ‘70s with deaf parents — and the mischief that ensues when, as their ears and mouthpiece, he is given the “keys to the kingdom.’
Heaton, Hunt and Rebecca Stay of FourBoys will executive produce along with Weiss, Matlin and Jason. CBS TV Studios is the studio. The project reunites Matlin with Weiss, with whom she worked onSwitched at Birth. Her recent TV credits include co-starring on the third season of ABC’s Quantico, as well as roles on Syfy’s The Magiciansand Fox’s Family Guy. She’ll next be seen in Limetown for Facebook Watch. Matlin made her film debut in Children of a Lesser God, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar.
Weiss created the Peabody-winning Switched at Birth, which ran for five seasons at ABC Family/Freeform, featuring multiple deaf actors and characters including Matlin who was recurring. She was also the showrunner for Season 1 of Facebook Watch’s Sorry For Your Loss, and wrote the surf girl movie Blue Crush.
FourBoys Entertainment is currently in pre-production on the movie Florence, Not, Italy, which Hunt will direct, and is also producing the Heaton-led comedy series Carol’s Second Act for CBS and CBS TV Studios along with creators/EP’s Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Kapital Entertainment. It’s set to premiere this fall on CBS.
At Disney+, CBS TV Studios has a series order for Diary of a Female President, from writer Ilana Peña and Gina Rodriguez’s I Can and I Will production company.
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.
