FuckAbility™ Research Council to Speechless: You Had Us At “Trash Ramp”

Matt Damon calls on Speechless producers to be more inclusive of nondisabled white male actors

Frankly, the Speechless pilot could end with Minnie Driver’s character pulling a Divine and it would simply convey the amount of shit people with disabilities and their families are expected to eat every day.

(Highway, Heaven) After a cruel, cruel summer that included When Khaleesi Met Romanticide and a profoundly fucked up little number called Don’t Breathe, the autumn winds are blowing our sad, tragic little skirts right up with Speechless.

According to FARC’s most recent findings, [INSERT NUMBER] people with disabilities expect that [INSERT ZERO] of characters on television will be fully-realized characters who live with a disability. When FARC asked them to factor in whether the disabled character would be an actor with a disability, that number doubled.

It’s rare for FARC to offer a response to a new entertainment without having watched more than a clip. But we don’t care.

When the clip includes a public school offering a disabled teenager a trash ramp as his accessible entrance – we’re good.

Frankly, the Speechless pilot could end with Minnie Driver’s character pulling a Divine and it would simply convey the amount of shit people with disabilities and their families are expected to eat every day.

We reached out to the afterlife to get a response from Michael Landon about his reaction to Speechless:

Highway to Heaven episode “All the Colors of the Heart” Courtesy Filmrise

“I’ll be honest. I felt the show would have benefited from the addition of two wandering middle-aged white men who would show up out of nowhere and be instantly invited by grieving parents and/or custodial adults to take a deep and caring interest in their broken young children who don’t know these strange men at all and, at first, reject their warm-hearted advances and offers of friendship, and then run away or withdraw, depending on the affliction, only to be found by these men who keep turning up everywhere in an odd way no one questions, and after some choking WORDLESS sobs – see, I watched your show – they teach him that they have a valuable lesson to share: We all have to shut the fuck up sometimes.”

Fuck that, Michael Landon. Speechless is ON.

FUCKABILITY™ RESEARCH COUNCIL (FARC) IS A PIECE OF LETTERHEAD HOUSED ON THE TALES FROM THE CRIP WEBSITE. FARC’S MISSION IS TO RAISE AWARENESS OF HOLLYWOOD’S LACK OF AWARENESS THAT MANY DISABLED ADULTS FUCK IN GROUPS OF ONE OR MORE. ALL VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND DENIAL.