Disabled leads -- too much for the viewer?

[inuvik]

doobrah said:

(Side note: I just saw "The Sea Inside", a Brazilian movie [subtitles] about a quadriplegic who wants to commit suicide. Won the best foreign film Oscar last year, and it's really great. Very character driven.)

I saw this when it came out in the theatres last year and it really is wonderful! It's a Spanish film though, not Brazilian.

[bjobsessed]

housemouse said:

I think this goes back to Anita's point about the way folks perceive handicapped people. They tend to look at them as "courageous" and even while treating them as being less, may see them as somehow being "more." I am not sure if that makes sense, but I do think this attitude is not helpful to people facing physical challenges. These are people, who again, in Anita's insightful words, have "adapted to their circumstances" nothing more, nothing less. You play the hand you are dealt. There are people moving through their lives as rape or incest survivors, bi-polar, or manic depressives etc. Their "handicap" is not out there for the world to see, but they face issues every day, they are just different

It makes perfect sense Mouse! People are always telling me how courageous I am because I have a job or I drive a car or I do a lot with kids or whatever. Yet, the tone of those words is almost like a pitying one or a "I'm glad that's not me" tone. (Your point on seeing as less but treating as more). Because I do the everyday things that everyone else does, I'm special or courageous--elevated and lowered at the same time. Of course, I am not saying that's true for everyone. No comment I make is ever intended to be a blanket statement, but there are still a large number of people out there who talk "down" to me as if I'm a little kid and a "poor dear." So not true!

You are also right on about the people with invisible disabilities too. Some of you know that I have friends who have a child with autism and a child with tourette's syndrome. The one with autism has social issues that are not his fault. They are part of his disability. He is often thought of as rude and out of control. The one with tourette's has what you call ticks and those are things that happen that she cannot control. For example, she may whistle constantly, or bounce up and down while humming. This can go on for several minutes before it stops. People don't look at these kids as courageous. Their disabilities are invisible really. Unless you know, they look like they're being spoiled brats. Are they any less "courageous" than I am? I don't think so. I also don't think I'm any more courageous than any of you. I get up and live my life the same as everyone else. I just do a few things differently.

Ok, that's it for my rant.

Back to Blind Justice. Having thought about it, I don't think the fact that the lead character was disabled had much to do with it's failure in the ratings game. As has been said:

It may have been heavily promoted in the beginning, but not once the ratings fell. (It was promoted much in my area at all. I tuned in on Rub a Tub Tub and watched the first two on tape.) I saw a million commercials for the series finale though. Almost seemed like they were celebrating the end.

I loved the fact that it was character driven. I loved watching Jim Dunbar make the journey to acceptance. Of course, I loved watching Ron and all the dedication he brought to the role too. It wasn't advertised that way though and I think people expected another NYPD Blue.

On the flipside, I've said before that some of the reviewers didn't care for Jim's situation after a while. Why is that? I don't really know. If anything like that happened to them or someone they knew--they would care. Are we just so into ourselves that we don't care what happens to other people?

I have watched a bit of Longstreet since taping it for Carl. It's an ok show, but not as well done as Blind Justice. There have been a few times when the main character has looked like he could see by the way he acted. The stories aren't bad though. Why didn't it last? I don't think it was a bad show at all for it's time.

Maybe it goes back to the fact that people want action, action, action and smut, smut, smut these days. There was none of that in Blind Justice at all. Maybe it was too personal and not enough action with the bad guys.

That's one of the reasons I really liked it. It wasn't another Law and Order clone.

Hope this makes a bit of sense. I feel like I'm rambling.

[Eyphur]

I just conferred with my best friend on the subject of whether or not people didn't watch Blind Justice because the main character happened to be blind. And she said "Saying people don't want to watch Blind Justice because the main character is disabled is like people saying We don't want to watch Superman because he is too strong."

[bjobsessed]

eyphur said:

I just conferred with my best friend on the subject of whether or not people didn't watch Blind Justice because the main character happened to be blind. And she said "Saying people don't want to watch Blind Justice because the main character is disabled is like people saying We don't want to watch Superman because he is too strong."

Good point! The only difference is that Superman is a super hero and Jim Dunbar could be a real person and the situation could be similar to real life.

Could that do it for some people? Obviously not for us.

Just a question.

[hoosier]

I seem to remember a made for TV movie with Gil Gerrard (Buck Rogers) as a cop who lost his hearing while on the job. Can not think of the name of it--maybe someone else can.

While some may have been turned off BJ for having a disabled main character , I think just as many may have thought it would be a rip-off of Daredevil where he would have some kind of super-power to compensate for his blindness. Either way, they were not interested enough to even give it a fair shake. I think a majority were just turned off by the idea of a blind cop with a GUN! All the commericals I saw emphasized that fact ad naseum. And like some of you here mentioned, it was character driven and thought provoking, relying more on the interaction of characters not the crime of the week so it was not your typical cop show.

I was not a big fan of NYPD Blue. I only saw it a handful of times. I know they hoped to capture some of the fans of NYPD, but why put a new show opposite a powerhouse like SVU? Another day and time might have made a difference. If there is nothing on ,don't you often give a new show a shot? I do.

After investing the time and more importantly the money in a show, why didn't ABC continue promoting it? It wasn't the ratings winner like Deperate Housewifes etc. and not all shows are. I seem to recall that they were willing to give Jake in Progress a second chance and it bombed right off the bat.

[awlrite4now]

hoosier said:

While some may have been turned off BJ for having a disabled main character , I think just as many may have thought it would be a rip-off of Daredevil where he would have some kind of super-power to compensate for his blindness. Either way, they were not interested enough to even give it a fair shake.

Ah, you knew I would pop up at the mention of Daredevil!

The first place I heard about the show Blind Justice was on the board at ManWithoutFear.com, when it was was when it was still in the planning stages. We speculated there a bit about whether or not it would be a reality based series or veer off into the superhero realm. The premise wasn't clearly drawn that early in the media.

When I first saw the early previews, the BAD thing about them was showing that scene that Jim was imagining in his head about the crime scene, along with that red blob thing in the scene of the standdown in the kitchen. That smacked a little too much of possible "supersenses" for the general public, and not enough for the people who would have loved to see it be something closer to the comic book world of Smallville.

It was a double jeopardy: not enough fantasy for some (Medium or Ghost Whisperer come to mind here), and not enough reality (Law & Order, CSI) for others. Those two extremes kept the mainstream from bothering to watch a really good drama. We all know that.

My answer is: no, the disability wasn't what turned off the viewers. It was the preconceived notion of how the series was going to be handled.

[Duchess of Lashes]

awlrite4now said:

When I first saw the early previews, the BAD thing about them was showing that scene that Jim was imagining in his head about the crime scene, along with that red blob thing in the scene of the standdown in the kitchen. That smacked a little too much of possible "supersenses" for the general public, and not enough for the people who would have loved to see it be something closer to the comic book world of Smallville.

It was a double jeopardy: not enough fantasy for some (Medium or Ghost Whisperer come to mind here), and not enough reality (Law & Order, CSI) for others. Those two extremes kept the mainstream from bothering to watch a really good drama. We all know that.

My answer is: no, the disability wasn't what turned off the viewers. It was the preconceived notion of how the series was going to be handled.

Good point, but for those of us who didn't have benefit of a "preconceived notion" about how the series would be handled, we were either drawn in by the strenghts of what was laid before us and were hooked or we couldn't get past the missing crime drama aspects of an expected cop show and we pulled out.

I knew when the I saw the first commercial (on ESPN) that I would tune in for the premier of Blind Justice, because it meant that Ron Eldard was going to be back on television. But, I didn't keep tuning in each week simply because it was Ron Eldard. What brought me back week after week was the excellence I found; in the writing, in the cinematography, in the characters and the strengths of those relationships. In all my years of television viewership, I have never looked forward to episodic television like I did with Blind Justice.

Unfortunately, I think ABC television did it a huge disservice, both in its marketing and advertising and in jumping ship after Episode Two. Every commercial touted this show as a cop show, a crime drama with a much different angle than CSI. They attempted to lure some of the CSI audience away but failed to maintain that audience because Blind Justice was not crime driven enough. That aspect was a sub-storyline, rather than the focus; it was through those storylines that the characters/relationships developed. Once the audience started to drift away, the ads for Blind Justice vitually disappeared from the airwaves.

And the timeslot had to hurt - it was a Bochco "cop show" following in the footsteps of a Bochco "cop show". If ABC was hoping to maintain its viewership simply by replacing one with the other, they erred. The two shows were so dynamically distant. Although character development was still a very strong proponent in NYPD, it was not the foundation on which that show was built. I don't profess to know anything about the way network television works, but I firmly believe they would have been better served to have found a new place in the line-up for Blind Justice, rather than slide it into a timeslot that was already affected by declining numbers.

Would Grey's Anatomy have been able to maintain better numbers at 10:00 on Tuesday night? Would Blind Justice have been a better fit on Sunday? Unfortunately we will never know. But, in retrospect, the difference in survival for Greys at that timeslot may have been in the fact that it was not pitting a "cop show" against an established cop show on a head to head basis.

For all that was right, Blind Justice had far too many strikes against it before it ever found its way to the marketplace. But for all that has been written, I still don't believe that the biggest strike against it was the fact that the lead character was blind.

[anna]

longlashes said:

I think Blind Justice had far too many strikes against it before it ever found its way to the marketplace. But I still don't believe that one of those strikes was the fact that the lead character was blind.

I'm not entirely convinced that the lead character's blindness in itself had nothing at all to do with it, but I agree that it is not what ultimately brought down the series.

I've talked to two guy friends who each watched the first three episodes and then quit watching. Each is a "modern man" "in touch with his feelings" who goes, without complaint, with his wife to see chick flicks. When I asked why they quit the show, neither mentioned the mere fact that Jim was blind. They just thought that it was not very good as a cop show - which was the way it was advertised - and they thought that it was totally unreasonable to think that Jim would have been allowed to carry a gun. They had no problem with his being on the streets, conducting interviews, etc., but the gun drove them crazy.

So, what if Jim had not been a cop with a gun? Is there some other profession that he would have had to fight so hard to get back into and work so hard to prove himself capable of doing once he returned to his job? Is there something else that would have offered the opportunity for this kind of drama? And, if so, would the show have lasted?

[Duchess of Lashes]

anna said:

longlashes said:

I think Blind Justice had far too many strikes against it before it ever found its way to the marketplace. But I still don't believe that one of those strikes was the fact that the lead character was blind.

I'm not entirely convinced that the lead character's blindness in itself had nothing at all to do with it, but I agree that it is not what ultimately brought down the series.

I've talked to two guy friends who each watched the first three episodes and then quit watching. Each is a "modern man" "in touch with his feelings" who goes, without complaint, with his wife to see chick flicks. When I asked why they quit the show, neither mentioned the mere fact that Jim was blind. They just thought that it was not very good as a cop show - which was the way it was advertised - and they thought that it was totally unreasonable to think that Jim would have been allowed to carry a gun. They had no problem with his being on the streets, conducting interviews, etc., but the gun drove them crazy.

So, what if Jim had not been a cop with a gun? Is there some other profession that he would have had to fight so hard to get back into and work so hard to prove himself capable of doing once he returned to his job? Is there something else that would have offered the opportunity for this kind of drama? And, if so, would the show have lasted?

I modified my post, obvioulsy in the throes of doing so while you were also posting. What you quoted is no longer it. I thought I had made all of the necessary revisions in the preview but I still wasn't happy with it once it was posted and I found a few things I thought could be better said so I modified, to this: For all that was right, Blind Justice had far too many strikes against it before it ever found its way to the marketplace. But for all that has been written, I still don't believe that the biggest strike against it was the fact that the lead character was blind.

I have also known some who tuned in, watched for a week or two and then tuned back out because it was a cop show without the "blood". There just wasn't enough of the criminal aspect to maintain their interest. Sad but true!

[mlm828]

anna said:

So, what if Jim had not been a cop with a gun? Is there some other profession that he would have had to fight so hard to get back into and work so hard to prove himself capable of doing once he returned to his job? Is there something else that would have offered the opportunity for this kind of drama? And, if so, would the show have lasted?

Excellent questions! I think a lot of the drama in Blind Justice revolved around the fact that Jim was returning to work as a cop -- a job few people believed he could, or should, do. Even though Jim's struggle to reclaim his life and define himself after losing his sight would have dramatic potential regardless of his profession, he encountered more resistance and skepticism going back to work as a cop than he would have in some other line of work, and this in turn fueled a lot of the drama. In the end, it's a trade-off. If he had gone back to work in some other occupation, people might have found it more "realistic" than going back to work as a cop, especially since the gun (presumably) would not have been an issue. But if Jim's return to work had been less difficult (not that it would have been easy), I wonder if his story would have been compelling enough to keep people watching.

[hoosier]

mlm828 said:

anna said:

So, what if Jim had not been a cop with a gun? Is there some other profession that he would have had to fight so hard to get back into and work so hard to prove himself capable of doing once he returned to his job? Is there something else that would have offered the opportunity for this kind of drama? And, if so, would the show have lasted?

Excellent questions! I think a lot of the drama in Blind Justice revolved around the fact that Jim was returning to work as a cop -- a job few people believed he could, or should, do. Even though Jim's struggle to reclaim his life and define himself after losing his sight would have dramatic potential regardless of his profession, he encountered more resistance and skepticism going back to work as a cop than he would have in some other line of work, and this in turn fueled a lot of the drama. In the end, it's a trade-off. If he had gone back to work in some other occupation, people might have found it more "realistic" than going back to work as a cop, especially since the gun (presumably) would not have been an issue. But if Jim's return to work had been less difficult (not that it would have been easy), I wonder if his story would have been compelling enough to keep people watching.

A different take on it? It would have made an interesting TV movie but as a weekly TV show? I am afraid it would probably fail as not compelling enough, as mlm pointed out. Having him as a cop, a difficult enough job for a sighted person, is what caught my attention in the first place. How would he do it? How could he do it? Teacher, lawyer--excuse me, there just wouldn't be the same bias against him.

[inuvik]

Another example I have thought of is The White Countess, which we have been talking about.

Here is a movie with a popular actor (Ralph Fiennes), a well known producer team (Merchant/Ivory), and yet it is not getting much a release beyond the biggest cities.

It's not Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener got a reasonable release), and Merchant/Ivory films usually do too (like The Remains of the Day).

Perhaps it is because the lead character is blind.

[maggiethecat]

inuvik said:

Another example I have thought of is The White Countess, which we have been talking about. Here is a movie with a popular actor (Ralph Fiennes), a well known producer team (Merchant/Ivory), and yet it is not getting much a release beyond the biggest cities. It's not Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener got a reasonable release), and Merchant/Ivory films usually do too (like The Remains of the Day). Perhaps it is because the lead character is blind.

I think it far more likely that White Countess is in limited release because it's not a "big" Merchant/Ivory like Howard's End or Remains of the Day . As best as I recall, Merchant/Ivory films tend to play in limited release -- mostly in the big cities or proven markets -- and I remember Howard's End only being re-released nationwide after it won a fistful of Oscars. I think this is the fate of most "indie" films unless, like Brokeback Mountain or Transamerica, they somehow catch on with reviewers and the public. Far more likely that White Countess was doomed to minor status because it was yet another Merchant/Ivory period drama set in the Thirties!

Plus, Ismail Merchant died while the film was being made, and so of course James Ivory has not been out promoting it with his usual enthusiasm. James Ivory and Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes were on the Charlie Rose PBS talk show one night, and they were all very subdued. Apparently it was a pretty grisly shoot (Shanghai climate plus Chinese bureaucracy). They didn't discuss the lead male character being blind all that much, seeming to regard it as just one element of the film. I got the feeling everyone worked for less money than usual because they liked the project, but I didn't get the vibe that anyone involved thought it was ever going to be more than an "art house" success.

[hoosier]

I think a real problem with BJ was that the powers that be could not decide if they wanted to do a show about a blind cop or a show about a man who was blind who happened to be a cop. They tried to do both and came up short--not enough police action/drama for the one and not enough personal drama for the other.

Personally, I think they should have gone with the latter. They threw us little tidbits--Jim's affair, the troubled marriage, his fight for reinstatement, that they hadn't been out socially until Clay's dinner party, etc.--and then failed to follow up on that. They didn't even tell us anything about that year it took for Jim to recover from the shooting--just that one aside comment to Artie that he hadn't even talked to another blind person since rehab! Plus they dropped the character of Galloway who gave us some insight into Jim's psyche.

While the cases were interesting, they were always neatly wrapped up by the end of the episode (except for Shall We Dance) and initially depended a lot on Jim's sense of smell. They almost seemed afraid to let Jim use the skills he had developed over those 10+ years as a detective!

If they had touted it as a "drama" not a "police" show and then focused on the human interest and not so much the legal aspects, they could have built a larger audience. But, coming from the Bochco stable, they instead focused on the "blind cop with a gun" ,a concept that most people saw as ridiculous and didn't even give it a chance.

[awlrite4now]

Ok, off topic a bit here, but when I clicked to view this thread, the ad at the top was for this:

www.cleanbutt.com/PRODUCT.ASP under Disabled products. Gave me a good laugh. It's an automatic, heated toilet seat.