Screen: YouTube
Remember Lydia Callis? During Hurricane Sandy, when she was on TV a lot offering simultaneous ASL translation for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at his press conferences, she became a sensation: praised for her expressiveness, featured in a supercut of her "many moods," the subject of a listicle on her "best moves." I predicted on this very site that she'd be spoofed on SNL, and she was.
Callis was profiled in a piece in Sunday's New York Times, which notes that the responses to Callis's signing, which had struck me at the time as condescending, were just benignly ignorant: "[T]he attention paid to her showed how little most people understand the deaf population and American Sign Language, which often depends on facial expressions and animated gestures to lend emphasis and emotion to communication." Even at the time, the fandom that grew up around Callis inspired explainer pieces about what she was doing and why, but when you Google her now, that stuff is a lot further down than that "many moods" HuffPo post that offensively described her "mugging for the camera and gesturing wildly."
In the Times piece, Callis describes both her frustration about her sudden fame, and the way she's turning meme lemons into activist lemonade by using her position to advocate for more services for Deaf and hard of hearing New Yorkers. Callis's experience is also a reminder that, despite the increasingly fragmented audience, TV does, on occasion, still introduce viewers to a new idea -- and, maybe even more rarely, can still teach us something.
TV creators can bristle when they're asked to contemplate diversity on their shows; for instance, when Shonda Rhimes tweeted a complaint that Bunheads featured no girls in the central dance class who weren't white, Amy Sherman-Palladino famously responded that she doesn't do "message shows." I'm not sure what "message" it would have been sending if a ballet class in a town in southern California had a racial makeup that even kind of lined up with that of the population of the state, but getting defensive about it only made Sherman-Palladino look worse and highlighted her unconscious privilege. All shows are "message shows" in the sense that they offer a vision of the world to the audience, and when a viewer doesn't feel him- or herself reflected in that vision, it can be alienating.
The idea of enforcing a diversity or inclusiveness quota during the TV development process would rightly be anathema in the industry, and yet it was a development executive's suggestion that she add a disabled character that helped Switched At Birth creator Lizzy Weiss to come to the decision to make one of her characters Deaf -- and the Deaf characters and their plotlines have really added complexity to what is fundamentally a teen-angst show. Viewers of Switched have watched stories about resources getting choked off from Deaf schools, the pro and con arguments surrounding cochlear implants, and the challenges of mixed hearing/Deaf romances, among many other things. When new characters come into the action, they suck at ASL, at first, but they practice and get better and are encouraged in their progress by the Deaf people (and Deaf allies) around them. It's all educational while never feeling didactic, because when you're exposed to people whose experiences are different from yours -- even if they aren't real -- it's hard not to come away having learned something.
And when the people who are different from you are real, seeing their lives play out on TV can be even more powerful, as with current Project Runway contestant Justin. The workroom -- the whole process of the show, really -- can be overwhelming and chaotic for any contestant (including the one, so far, who's already just straight-up quit), and the show has interestingly shown how Justin's hearing impairment can be kind of a boon: when other people get into their screaming bullshit, he can just turn off his cochlear implant and focus on his work. The latest episode, however, also gave the designers a chance to socialize outside the game, and let Justin tell us what it meant to him to be able to have actual conversations with his colleagues.
Throughout Justin's participation on the show, we've seen him working with his sign-language interpreter -- she's in the back of a Lexus as Justin talks strategy with his team, or on the runway translating as Heidi delivers the challenge.
Screen: Lifetime
Her presence feels both matter-of-fact and radical; we know why she's there, because duh, but it's never discussed. While other designers may need assistance in the form of contact lenses or Lexapro, Justin needs an interpreter, and her work lets him participate fully in the show's challenges. Runway is showing us, every week, that a person with a different need can be accommodated in a work situation, how that functionally plays out, and how valuable his contributions are to the whole project now that he's part of it. Being on TV gives these ASL interpreters the opportunity to widen the scope of their effect on the world and make viewers add a new layer to their concepts of diversity and inclusiveness -- lessons that don't feel like they're even being taught.