In last Tuesday’s premiere of ABC’s new comedy “Bob Patterson,” Claudia, the wheelchair-bound new assistant to the country’s No. 3 motivational speaker, got a smashing introduction: She smashed into one guy’s leg, and she smashed into her desk, which she then proceeded to demolish as she clumsily knocked her keyboard, cup and other objects off the top.
In the premiere’s plot, Claudia had only been using her wheelchair for a few weeks, which explains the mayhem. But her behavior still troubled some disabled people.
“There was a deep concern that the buffoonery puts people back,” said Tari Susan Hartman of EIN SOF Communications, a marketing and public-relations firm specializing in social issues involving the disabled.
Claudia, played by actress Chandra Wilson (who doesn’t use a wheelchair in real life) is the latest in a small group of TV characters who use wheelchairs or other aids to get around. Her debut, perhaps inevitably, has sparked renewed interest in how television is portraying people with these kinds of disabilities, and disabled people in general.
“If it’s what non-disabled people think is funny, it can be offensive,” Hartman said. “If it comes from a majority culture, that perception, their collective stereotypes, the myths, the misperceptions that they have about a marginalized group . . . then it’s not funny. “
Breakthrough character
Wilson argues that’s not the case in “Bob Patterson” (8 p.m. Tuesdays, WLS-Ch. 7) , and Tuesday’s episode supports her. Claudia’s wheelchair miscues aren’t the butt of jokes at all.
“She’s brilliant, she’s a wonderful assistant,” said Wilson, 32. “She just hasn’t been able to show that part yet because she’s got to relearn her space every time she’s in a new space.”
Hartman considers Claudia a “breakthrough” character who will only be special as long as she is treated fairly and realistically. “For the fact that the producers were bold enough to have a person of color with a disability, that’s a breakthrough,” Hartman said. “For the fact that they want to have somebody in the workplace with a disability, that’s a breakthrough. For the fact that she’s going to be around as a series regular, that’s a breakthrough.
“However, what’s not a breakthrough is that she’s the butt of the humor.”
Claudia simply being clumsy in her wheelchair won’t define the character, Wilson countered. “I think if I concentrate on the person, if I concentrate on Claudia, who she is, where her humor is, what she’s about, that will kind of take the place of any, for lack of a better term, controversy that might come up.”
In fact, there’s nothing wrong with laughs involving people with disabilities — as long as there is context to the humor, said David Hanson, executive director of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities in Chicago.
“I would hope that in the disability community, that would be acceptable and be something that they could find humorous, especially if it’s done right,” he said. “People who have been injured have gone through things like that, falling out of their chair, doing a wheelie and going backwards, taking an electric chair and running into a wall. They’ve done it, and it’s been funny. It’s been serious, too, in some cases, but it can be funny.”
Wilson added: “It’s just life. And it happens to be funny, because if she were to sit back and think about it, she’d probably laugh too.”
Somebody real
The character is not just there to be funny, adds “Patterson” star Jason Alexander, but to serve as a counterpoint to Patterson’s skewed world view. “We wanted somebody who was real in [Patterson’s] world, who was not impressed with his hype and his celebrity, who could deal with him really sort of as just a guy off the street,” he said. “And I must tell you that a lot of where we’re going with her we learned about from how Chandra did the role.”
The character Claudia is the latest incarnation of a TV tradition dating back at least as far as Raymond Burr’s indomitable San Francisco police chief of detectives in NBC’s 1967-75 series “Ironside.” More recent is character Kerry Weaver (Laura Innes), the prickly chief of emergency medicine who walks with a crutch on NBC’s “ER.” Hartman particularly noted that a big deal has never been made that Weaver has a disability, or how she became disabled.
Daytime soap operas and commercials have been especially in tune with wheelchair-bound extras, as well as the prime-time series “Lou Grant” and “Murphy Brown.”
These have mostly been dramas. But using a wheelchair has never impaired 13-year-old Pelswick Eggert, the fun-loving hero of Nickelodeon’s animated series “Pelswick.”
Comedies like “Pelswick” and “Bob Patterson” can work, as long as there is a perspective as to what it means to be disabled, argues Hartman, who has consulted on hundreds of TV and movie projects, and hopes to meet with the “Patterson” producers about Claudia. Hartman also organized the Committee of Performers with Disabilities for the Screen Actors Guild. October, she noted, is National Disability Awareness Month.
Character not typecast
Which only serves to heighten the fact that someone who uses a wheelchair wasn’t cast in the part of Claudia. “I would think that they could have made it more realistic and funny by using a person with real experience, instead of putting an actress in the chair without any direction from somebody,” Hanson said. “They lose credibility with the disability community from that standpoint.”
Wilson said the casting sheet called for an African-American woman for a part in which she would have to use a wheelchair. After auditioning for the producers and eventually the network, she got the role — for her comedy, and not her wheelchair skills.
“For whatever reason, I get cast a lot just because there’s a sense of humor there,” she said. “No matter what the material is, I usually can find some humor. Just some human humor.” (Series producers were unavailable to comment on the casting procedure.)
Still, Hartman noted that some progress has been made in characters using wheelchairs becoming part of the television landscape. Considering there are 56 million handicapped people in the country, she added, they deserve better representation.
