From the riotous office humour of Jerk to the satirical genius of Special, TV is finally embracing characters with cerebral palsy. We ask the stars of this new wave: is this a watershed moment?
‘It took years to convince someone to make this show,” says Ryan O’Connell. “First of all, my book flopped and sold two copies.” Called I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, the book was a moving and hilarious account of something he had been hiding in the popular blogs he had written about his life as a gay millennial. Like 17 million other people around the world, O’Connell has cerebral palsy, a condition affecting muscular coordination.
Four years on, Special, the comedy series based on his book, is airing on Netflix to great acclaim. Written by and starring O’Connell as a fictionalised version of himself, Special follows the writer as he interns at a clickbait journalism site called Eggwoke that publishes confessional blogs headlined “50 Ways to Hate Myself” or “Why Do I Keep Finding Things in My Vagina?” When his colleagues assume his condition is the result of a car accident, and not cerebral palsy, he goes along with it.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Wri8YI
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