The annual Media Access Awards, held this year in front of an SRO crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and hosted by Marlee Matlin,  is one of the few occasions when the Hollywood disability community gathers, hands out a few well-deserved awards, and celebrates its growing presence in film and TV. And its presence is growing. Despite what you might have read in the newspapers lately, there is solid progress to report.

First of all, the bad news: the statistics on the number of characters with disabilities on network TV are pathetic. According to a recent GLAAD report, there are currently only five regular characters with disabilities on network TV. Apparently this is one less than last year. The report made it sound, at least to my ears, like all the effort by scores of advocates in the last ten years to include more characters with disabilities in mainstream media has been a big waste of time.

But this is wrong, or at least leaves the wrong impression. First of all, who watches only network TV? I have a twenty-something son who makes absolutely no distinction between digital landing spots on the remote. "30Rock" is plenty funny. Click. Time for "Louie" or "It's Always Sunny." Making any distinction for a viewer between network and cable in 2011 is ludicrous, something even the Emmy people realized a decade or so ago.

In photo: Jason Katims ("Parenthood"), Margaret Nagle ("Warm Springs"), your blogger, Marlee Matlin, and Robert David Hall ("CSI")

If you count cable and network TV together, the picture changes. For example, the Producers Guild of America's George Sunga Award went to Paul Stupin, executive producer of the ABC Family hit, "Switched at Birth." The series is rift with characters who happen to be deaf, teenager characters confronting the world, and other teenagers, as they figure out who they are. This is a show watched by young people. Young people want to see other young people in screen, and in this world, at least, it doesn't matter if they are deaf or not.

On the other hand, the WGA Even Somers Award went to a highly-acclaimed network TV writer, Jason Katims, the man who oversaw the TV version of "Friday Night Lights," a show that also brought him Emmy and Humanitas awards this year. "FNL," already a classic before it left the air, featured in its early seasons a high school football player paralyzed on the field. This kid went through years of adjustment, par for the course for someone in his shape. He didn't get up and walk away in the third act. Jason now exec produces "Parenthood," noted for a pre-teen dealing with Asperser's right in the middle of the show.

Including the whole universe of TV, the number of characters, and in most cases actors, with disabilities doubles or more. And that's only counting recurring characters. HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- with story line after story line having Larry being irritated by someone with a disability – doesn't count in this kind of survey. The last "Curb" of the season had Larry in a drag-out battle with Michael J. Fox around whether Michael's Parkinson's-induced twitching was "real" or a subtle insult to Larry. It was hilarious.

The added element to this disabled-on-TV equation, besides bean counting, is impact. Anyone who watched "Seinfeld" in the 90's knows that Kramer's good buddy, a little person named Mickey played brilliantly by actor Danny Woodburn, was just as strangely wired as Kramer. And you laugh just thinking about Kramer and Mickey in matching plaid shirts. In good shows like this, "Friday Night Lights," "Switch at Birth," and "Breaking Bad," images and characters seep in and stay.

The overall picture is not rosy, that's for damn sure, but there is now a growing coterie of talented people in Hollywood who won't let a disability dissuade them from making it, and the first requirement for making it is chutzpah. And now it's multi-generational. For all those youngsters in the audience seeing Marlee Matlin on stage, an Academy Award-winning star and Hollywood mainstay, it must have only made their own fire burn even hotter.

As Marlee ended the event, she shouted out in sign, "We will win this battle for inclusion!" And I don't think there was a person in the room, disabled or not, who didn't believe it.

© 2011 Allen Rucker |

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