“Every single viewer — deaf or hearing — was forced to put away their
phones and iPads and anything else distracting in this A.D.D. world we
all live in and focus,” said Lizzy Weiss, the creator of the series.
Captioning translated the sign language for viewers. “You had to read,”
she said. “You couldn’t do anything else. And that made you get into it
more. It drew you in.”
The almost silent episode (there was still a musical score) mostly held
its own in the Monday night ratings, much to the satisfaction of
advocates for the deaf and hard-of-hearing population in the country.
“Who knew a teen show on ABC Family could be so cutting edge?” said Beth
Haller, a journalism professor at Towson University in Maryland, who
has studied media portrayals of people with disabilities for two
decades. She found “Switched at Birth” so significant that she presented
an academic paper about it last fall.
The show is the first mainstream series in the United States to include
multiple main characters who are deaf, played by deaf actors, including
Marlee Matlin, the Academy Award winner who plays a school counselor on
the show, and almost every episode since the premiere in 2011 has
incorporated sign language. Previous episodes have tackled issues like
cochlear implants, speech therapy and romantic relationships between
those who are deaf and those who are not.
“Even as far back as Episode 2, the producers have been prepping the
audience to watch a show with lots of character dialogue in sign
language,” Ms. Haller said, since that episode “explored how lip reading
doesn’t work well for most deaf people.”
But no episode had been told solely in sign language until “Uprising,” a
story about the possible closing of the school for the deaf that
several characters attend. The characters organized a protest, inspired
by demonstrations in 1988 to draw attention to the demand for a deaf
president to lead Gallaudet University, the country’s only liberal arts
university for deaf students.
Both Ms. Weiss’s writing staff and the programmers at ABC Family were
intrigued by the possibility of an all-sign-language episode. The point,
Ms. Weiss said, “was about revealing something new to the viewer — what
does it feel like to be an outsider? What does it feel like to have to
read and focus for an entire episode, like deaf viewers do all the
time?”
That idea isn’t necessarily alien to ABC Family’s young audience. There
is a vibrant subculture about signing on the Internet, which has made
sign language (and foreign languages) more accessible. On YouTube it’s
easy to find people who treat signing as a kind of performance, whether
they’re teaching others how to do it or signing the words to hit songs.
For “Switched at Birth,” production was challenging, since there were
dozens of deaf actors on the set, each of whom had an interpreter.
“Signing is a visual language, so the actors had to be positioned so
that they could see each other at all times,” Ms. Weiss said — no saying
“hello” to someone’s back, for instance. Props couldn’t block the
characters from using their hands, either. “Just so many little things
you might not realize,” she said.
Katie Leclerc and Vanessa Marano, the actors who play the teenagers who
were switched at birth, giving the series its name, explained the
premise at the beginning of the episode, both in English and in sign
language.
Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers commented by the thousands after the
show, with many saying in effect: “Yes! That’s what it feels like.” At
Gallaudet, there were viewing parties on Monday; the university produced
a special
30-second commercial for the occasion and later sent ABC Family 35 pages of Facebook comments they’d received about the episode.
A spokeswoman for the National Association of the Deaf said the protest
episode — which it praised beforehand as “phenomenal and groundbreaking”
— had generated so much dialogue “because the situation is very real to
us.” The association has been
lobbying against budget cuts
for schools like the one portrayed on the show. Next week’s episode of
“Switched at Birth,” its second-season finale, will reveal whether the
characters’ protest worked.
The all-sign-language show’s overnight Nielsen ratings were down, but
only slightly — 1.6 million viewers, compared with the season average of
1.7 million. In the show’s target demographic, women 12 to 34, it drew
748,000 viewers, compared with the season average of 777,000. About a
quarter of viewers usually record the show and watch it later, so the
final ratings won’t come in for weeks. Ms. Weiss was surprised that
ratings didn’t go up, given the online attention the episode received
ahead of time. Not that she cared; Monday’s episode wasn’t about
ratings.
“I think TV now is so much about word-of-mouth,” she said, “and I have
faith that we did a lot with that episode to get people talking about
the show and telling friends to start from the beginning on Netflix.”
