“Trash or person?” Maya DiMeo (Minnie Driver) demands in a dry British accent in the pilot episode of ABC’s sitcom Speechless. Her character’s son, a teenage boy with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair, has been forced to enter his school using a ramp that doubles as an egress for waste disposal. Later in the episode, DiMeo will browbeat the school’s principal into providing her son with a new aide. Later, she’ll smooth over arguments with her kids, kiss her husband, and likely balance the checkbook.
Speechless dramatizes an aspect of my life I’ve never seen on television before — the fight of a parent of a disabled child (my son has Down syndrome) for education access. Imagine my surprise: Not only is Minnie Driver not exactly my doppelgänger, disability-related storylines on TV are rare and often reinforce stigma.
On TV, disability is played for laughs, for horror (such as with the “evil cripple” trope), or ignored even by shows otherwise committed to diversity. While critics have coined the phrase “crip up” to refer to the many able-bodied actors who have played disabled characters, often to widespread acclaim, a study by the Ruderman Family Foundation found that 95 percent of all disabled characters are played by abled actors (full disclosure, I have worked for the Ruderman Family Foundation on other projects).
Despite this context, the creators of Speechless and the family drama Switched at Birth, both on air this spring, are talking to people with lived experience with disability, casting disabled people to play disabled characters, and using the structure of their respective genres to tell stories that ring true to a parent like me. And by incorporating unconventional families — which resemble my own in their battles over access and stigma — into classic American television genres, they are directing contemporary dialogues about disability straight at a mainstream audience.
[For more of this story, written by David M. Perry, go to https://psmag.com/the-shows-sh...b01f3332b#.uwfgr433w]
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