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From tumblr blog, The Lame Dame.

Full Review: The Michael J. Fox Show

Episode 1, "Pilot"

Episode 2, "Neighbor"

Spoilers Ahead? … Yes, I reveal a few punchlines, but it's not clear yet whether this show is going to feature long-running story arcs with big secrets to keep from late viewers.

What's It About? …

Mike Henry was a beloved local news anchor in New York City, and some time ago left the job due to Parkinson's Disease. We meet Mike and his family as he decides to go back to his old job behind the anchor desk. His family is happy, because they have become the only outlets for Mike's natural enthusiasm, driving them crazy as he benevolently meddles in their everyday lives. His former producer, Harris, is glad, partly because he can parlay Mike's "inspirational" return into higher ratings. Henry is given a new assistant, a young woman who's admiration for him borders on worship. Meanwhile, his wife and three children … and his permanently irresponsible sister … deal with their own lives and quirks.

Background Information …

The big news, obviously, is that Mike Henry is played by Michael J. Fox, who actually has Parkinson's Disease. How much of a difference will this make to the insightfulness and authenticity of the show?

Annie Henry, Mike's wife, is played by Betsy Brandt, who has just finished a long and excellent run as Marie Schrader on "Breaking Bad". Here she may be able to let her comic talents shine a bit more.

Harris Green, Mike's producer at the TV station, is played by Wendell Pierce, who was Bunk, McNulty's partner on "The Wire". Will Harris become more than just a TV news version of Bunk?

The Pilot episode used several real-life NBC personalities to establish the kind of world Mike inhabits. How often will the show continue to use Matt Lauer cameos?

In Episode 2, the sexy neighbor is played by Tracy Pollan, who is Fox's wife.

The Good ...

The show kicked off with two episodes broadcast back to back, and gave us two important and relatively sophisticated disability themes right out of the gate. The Pilot episode beautifully introduced us to the concept of "inspiration porn". It didn't use that term, (I would LOVE IT if a future episode used that phrase!), but by showing us how silly it is when people over-praise and sentimentalize disabled people, it got the idea across better than an academic explanation or a direct complaint. There were three main points where the message hit home:

• When Mike predicts how the network will use slo-mo footage and heroic music to promote his return, his producer denies it, while exactly such a promo plays on the newsroom screens behind them.

• When daughter Eve's teacher gives her an F for her documentary film about Mike, because of how sentimental and phony it is.

• A throwaway moment, easy to miss, when Mike's boss unwittingly illustrates the cynicism of "inspiration porn" by suggesting that an equivalent option would be showing footage of pandas. Overcoming disabled people / cute pandas, same emotions, right?

Both "sides" of the issue get fair play. Mike isn't depicted as bitter or ungrateful for his dread of effusive praise, while his wife gets a moment when she maybe speaks for most viewers. When Mike fears that he'll get a standing ovation from his coworkers at the station, she responds, "Standing ovation? Ugh, those sons of bitches!"

My favorite direct Parkinson's Disease joke was at the breakfast table, as Mike sloooowly moves to serve his wife a scoop of scrambled eggs, until she interrupts, grabs the spoon, and says, “Can you not have a personal victory right now? We are starving.”  It is a joke at the expense of his disability, and how it annoys others, but it's gentile and truthful. It also works because by this point the show has well established that Mike is belittled only the way all sitcom (and real life) Dads are in their families. His disability is just one unique quirk that sometimes makes his family roll their eyes. He is emphatically not a dependent or lesser member of his family.

In fact, I think a key to how this show handles disability is that so far, what silliness there is in Mike isn't mainly about his disability. It's more that he's kind of an eager-beaver … an enthusiastic, straightforward optimist in a family … and a profession ... where everyone has a layer of feigned weariness and cynicism. He's a goofy, slightly out of touch Dad. We love him, but he's a little embarrassing. Nobody says it, but it feels like he probably was always that way, well before he got Parkinson's.

The second episode, titled "The Neighbor", should have been titled "Self-Image". That seems to me to have been the episode's main theme … how people see themselves and how twists in their self-image can mess them up.

First, Eve has an image of herself as a progressive person who embraces a carefully assembled group of diverse friends. She seems really excited to have found a lesbian friend, but worries that clumsy comments from her family will ruin things when the friend comes to visit. Clearly, none of them could care less either way. It's Eve who is all wound up about it, to the extent that she even gets it wrong … her new friend isn't a lesbian. She just kind of vaguely looks and dresses like a certain stereotype of lesbians, so Eve just assumed.

Meanwhile ...

Mike meets a sexy new neighbor, and makes a mild fool out of himself in seemingly having a "crush" on her. Later he tells his wife that it's not so much that he had a crush on the neighbor, but that the neighbor kind of had a crush on him. This pleased but also discombobulated him because it ran counter to his feeling that since his Parkinson's, he might not be desirable anymore. Well, the neighbor really was flirting with him a bit, and Mike's wife makes it absolutely clear that she's still attracted to him.

So far, "The Michael J. Fox Show" not only gets the disability stuff right, it digs surprisingly deep, past bland, entry-level disability awareness platitudes.

The Bad ...

I can't believe I'm saying this, but everyone talks too fast. Mike, especially, and that may be an effect of his Parkinson's Disease. I hope I'm just imagining this, or that either I get used to it or they actually manage to slow down a little. 

So far, the older son is kind of a confusing mess, the younger son is a blank slate, and Mike's older sister is shaping up to be really annoying … to us, the viewers, not just to the Henry family.

I don't really like having the morals spelled out for us by characters addressing us through the camera. Maybe it's necessary, to help reinforce the fairly ambitious disability themes the show seems to be laying out. If every episode has what my favorite Star Trek podcast calls a "You see Timmy …" moment, it will take the show down a notch.

As some critics have said, the show isn't very funny. I'm not saying they need "More Jokes!"; there have been several comedies in recent years that were hilarious without being dueling standup routines. I just hope as the rest of the characters fill out they'll each pack in more laughs by being themselves.

Conclusion …

If the show itself can improve enough to survive, then "The Michael J. Fox Show" could actually do what we always hope disability stories and characters will do, change how real people understand disability.

Further reading …

Michael J. Fox a role model for disabled

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, USA Today

I'm Not Here for Your Inspiration, and Neither is Michael J. Fox

Words I Wheel By, by Disability Blogger Emily Ladau.

Mo Ryan, Huffington Post

Alan Sepinwall, Hitfix.com

James Poniewozik, Time.com

Robert David Sullivan, The AV Club

Up Next: "Ironside"

The pilot episode is already on Hulu Plus, but I’m waiting to see it on NBC this Wednesday, October 2, at 10 PM. Also on Hulu Plus is the original “Ironside”, worth a look to compare!

The Michael J. Fox Show - First Impressions

I'm still working on starting a podcast about disability in TV and movies, but until I get my act together, I'll be writing reviews. I'll typically start with day-after "First Impressions", followed a day or two later with more in-depth reviews of each episode.

The first two episodes of "The Michael J. Fox Show" were in some ways better than I thought, and at the same time a bit disappointing. And the two qualities are reversed from what I anticipated. I thought the most likely outcome would be that the show itself would be funny and energetic … promising for it's overall future and survivability … but problematic in regard to how it handled disability, despite the fact that Alex P. Keaton (sorry) Michael J. Fox knows whereof he speaks in regard to his main character's Parkinson's Disease. As it turned out, I found the show overall kind of lackluster and … frankly … poorly executed. Yet, the disability themes were much more sophisticated and pertinent than I had hoped. If this show lasts long enough, it might actually move viewers to a more nuanced understanding of disability.

More details to come in a few days ...

Petition: Disabled Veterans and Transportation

A local disability activist and the Independent Living Center where I used to work are collaborating on what at first seemed like a local problem, but now appears to have national scope. Like many communities, ours has a disabled veterans group providing van rides to medical appointments at facilities that are rather far away … for us it's often hospitals in Burligton, Vermont and Albany, New York. The problem is that none of their vans are wheelchair accessible, despite the fact that the organization is specifically for Disabled American Veterans. Not only that, but it seems to be a nation-wide pattern. Either they don't want to spend the money to buy vans with lifts or ramps, or their volunteers don't want the responsibility or perceived liability of transporting "non-ambulatory" veterans. So, if you can walk … with a cane, walker, whatever … you can get a ride. If you use a wheelchair, you're on your own.

At the ILC where I worked, we had a van for some years that we used to transport people with disabilities to doctor's appointments. It had a ramp though, and because of that we would only transport wheelchair users. We only had the one van, and we figured that if you could ride in any other kind of vehicle, you had more options. We reserved our service with people who had no other options. At the time I actually rather hated this policy, too, since we had to turn away people who didn't have their own cars, didn't have friends or family to drive them, or couldn't afford cabs. But at least the policy made some sort of sense for a disability organization.

There's a "Change.org" petition to sign:

"Currently, the jointly operated DAV-VA National Transportation Program offers free rides to Veterans needing transportation to Veterans Administration Medical facilities. Most of the vans are not wheelchair accessible leaving out the most (physically) disabled Veterans who use wheelchairs for mobility. In addition, there are written policies in place stating: "ambulatory only/no wheelchairs". This policy is discriminatory and must be changed."

Click here to sign the petition.

On Tonight!

The Michael J. Fox Show

9:00 PM Eastern, on NBC

I'll be watching, and here are some things I'll be watching for:

If the Parkinson's jokes are funny tonight, will they still be funny if they continue the same way week after week?\

Is the show strong enough to work if they tone down the Parkinson's stuff now and then?

Do the workplace problems and their solutions seem realistic?

Does it feel like the show is trying to teach us things about Parkinson's Disease or other disabilities?

Does the show explore different ways non-disabled people react to people with disabilities?

Does the show poke fun at non-disabled peoples' reaction to people with disabilities, as well as the disabled people themselves?

How strong and interesting are the other characters?

Am I going to watch it next week out of disability loyalty, or because I liked it?

How awesome are Betsy Brandt (from Breaking Bad) and Wendell Pierce (from The Wire)?

Recommended: Letters To Our Younger Selves

Letters To Thrive

There was a stretch of years in the early 2000s when one of the hottest topics in Special Education was "Transition". That's the name given to the topic of youth with disabilities in their final years of high school and what schools should be doing to help them make the best possible "transition" to adult life. Everyone wanted to figure out what combination of services and experiences would produce the best results in terms of general independence, students being more or less happy after graduation, and of course, gainful employment.

Most people interested in the topic seemed to settle on one or two general ideas. First, that schools should do more one-on-one counseling and planning with disabled students and their families, and start doing it further in advance of graduation day. Second, that schools should create more opportunities for disabled students to visit colleges and / or get work experience out in the community.

I have always been disappointed that peer mentoring didn't gain much traction. It didn't even get much in the way of proper testing and experimentation. Most funding went to training for teachers and counselors, and to work experience programs. It seemed to me that what students with disabilities needed most was real conversation, guidance, and support from adults with disabilities ... people who can speak with some authenticity about what the future can hold for kids with disabilities.

All of which I say just to explain why I'm so excited by the "Letters To Thrive" blog, where women with disabilities write letters to their younger selves. I hope either it expands to include men, or that someone else starts a similar blog for both men and women. Either way, it's a great format for the kind of wisdom it's hard to form into a curriculum or explain in a set of PowerPoints. I'm amazed something like this never came up that I heard in discussions about Transition.

I might try and write my own letter to my high-school-aged self.

Recommended: "Listen"

The Tumblr blog too brain fogged for this offers up what I think is a nearly perfect answer to an anonymously submitted question. The questioner seems to be reacting to the blogger's frequent posting about ways people with disabilities are treated poorly … and wants to know how people with disabilities should be treated.

The answer, in a word, is "Listen", but please do read the whole piece, it explains so much so well, so honestly, and so efficiently.

NYT Editorial on Ethan Saylor

Editorial: A Chance to Learn From a Senseless Death

The Editorial Board, New York Times - September 18, 2013

This is a good editorial about an encouraging development in the Ethan Saylor case. I have two things to add:

1. The Editorial Board says that the problem was the security guards' failure "to distinguish between mental illness and mental disability" … as if it would be okay to act as they did if Ethan had Schizophrenia instead of Down Syndrome. The problem was their failure to distinguish between disability and willful criminality. As I've said before, I also suspect it was a failure to listen to people on the scene with relevant information, but we may not know enough yet to claim this as fact.

2. The other thing is that I'd like to know whether the Governor's commission will have substantial … hopefully majority … representation of people with various disabilities. At minimum, there should be people on the commission with physical, cognitive, mental, and sensory disabilities. And they should be people who know how to serve effectively on a commission, not just people chosen to occupy a chair and make the commission look diverse.

Friday Afternoon Music

This new Superchunk album has sustained my good mood for days. Have fun spotting the album covers!

Working On A Longish Piece

I'm working on what's turning out to be a fairly long blog post that I hope will make some sense out of conficting thoughts I've had recently about disability, ableism, and what "we" want from non-disabled people and culture.

This article actually has helped me organize my thoughts somewhat, so I'll post it now and refer to it later:

10 Things Every Person With A Disability Should Hear (All The Time!)

Tiffiny Carlson, The Mobility Resource / Huffington Post - September 18, 2013

What could possibly be wrong with this?

Deal would offer casino jobs for the disabled

Alana Melanson, Sentinel & Enterprise - September 19, 2013

So a casino company agrees with a developmental disability service provider to "open up employment opportunities" for the developmentally disabled people they serve, in a proposed "slots parlor". Isn't that nice? 

That's some hard-hittin', question-askin' journalism right there!

The only hint that anyone might question the wonderfulness of this "deal" is an almost joking comment that the Arc of Opportunity people aren't worried their clients will become addicted to gambling. First of all, isn't that at least a somewhat reasonable concern? But second, isn't it the least of the possible concerns here?

Are these job slots going to be pre-designated for developmentally disabled applicants referred through the Arc? Or, are they just agreeing to consider the Arc's people? What about people with disabilities not affiliated with Arc? If I lived in Leominster, Mass. would I have the inside track on one of those jobs?

How much will these workers be paid? Are they going to get at least minimum wage or more? Will there be clear opportunities for individuals to advance to better, and better-paying positions if they do a good job? Will any of the Arc workers get benefits, like health insurance?

Will the casino company pay the workers directly? Or, will they pay Arc of Opportunity a fee to staff all these positions with whoever, with Arc in turn paying the workers?

Will the other, non-disabled casino staff work alongside the Arc workers? Or, will there be walls … literal and figurative … between the Arc crews and the "regular" workers?

If an Arc worker has a concern or complaint, who will they take it to? Will they talk to the Arc, or the casino company?

If the casino company doesn't like the arrangement down the line, can they just end the agreement and all the Arc workers lose their jobs?

Why involve the Arc at all? If the positions are open anyway, why doesn't the casino just market the jobs to Arc and other disability agencies, indicating their openness to hiring, but leaving individuals to decide whether or not to apply on their own? Why the package deal? Or, would individual disabled applicants not be welcomed, if not herded and wrangled en mass by the professionals at Arc?

Is it possible that the casino company hopes the positive PR they get from this "memorandum of understanding" will help them win approval for the slots parlor, which local residents will vote on in a referendum?

It's funny how this article was clearly written as a "good news" piece, but I don't feel good about it at all.

============

Addendum:

Most of my questions assume that there really is more to this than an empty agreement ... that the Arc is basically going to supply the slots parlor with labor to fill certain jobs, similar to how a temp agency works. But if this isn't the case, if it's literally just an agreement to "open" jobs to people with disabilities, then essentially the company would be saying, "We agree to abide by non-discrimination laws ... aren't we awesome? Please vote to approve our slots parlor!"

Should we give "Ironside" a chance?

Does it matter that the new "Ironside", Blair Underwood, doesn't have a disability?

I'm going to take a clear, firm stand and say "Yes and No".

The first thing I want to know is whether the performance is good. If it's good … by which I mean some strong combination of authentic, realistic, nuanced, complex, and free of disability clichés … then I probably won't let the lack of a first-hand disability perspective ruin my enjoyment.

If, on the other hand, the remade Ironside looks and feels like a non-disabled person's idealized or ugly conception of what it's like to be disabled, then I'll have to wonder if a real disabled actor might have done a better job.

Going back to the "if it's good" possibility, that would still lead me to ask why a disabled actor couldn't have done even better. The reason being given by the show's creators is that they want to use lots of flashbacks to incidents in Ironside's life before his injury, so they need an actor who can play both in and out of the wheelchair. But, as astute disability blogger Wheelchair Dancer points out, lots of people use wheelchairs part time, and can both walk and wheel. If they couldn't find anyone who could do both and was a great actor, then fine. Did they seriously try to find one? Or did they automatically view wheelchair use as an either / or thing? She also notes that as it is, Blair Underwood has a stunt double, who could have worked with a disabled actor to do the walking and running flashback bits.

There's also this … Who says they need a "great actor" anyway? Right now, they have a known actor, Blair Underwood, who is known because really, he is very good. On the other hand, anyone who loves TV and movies will tell you that a "name" actor isn't a guarantee of quality, and that sometimes the deepest, grittiest performances come from actors you've never heard of before. Besides, I'm not sure the new "Ironside" is really aiming to be a "prestige drama" anyway. I'd be surprised if it turns out to be, say, similar to the "Battlestar Galactica" remake … though very pleasantly surprised if it is.

I love good TV, and I have a longstanding affection for the original "Ironside", so yes, I'm going to give it a chance and I do hope above all that the new show is good, solidly entertaining, and fresh, if not profound and deep.

One thing I'll need to do is listen carefully to how wheelchair users respond to the show. I have disabilities, but I don't use a wheelchair and I don't have a spinal cord injury, so I could miss some technical inaccuracies if there are any.