Submitted by a summer film viewer.
8/13/24
A thought on “Special,” this week’s entry in the CAL/Advocado Press Film Series
Special is a 2-season, 8-episode series on Netflix dating from 2019. It is written and produced by Ryan O’Connell, who has mild cerebral palsy. He also plays the lead. He was a scriptwriter prior to the series, but not an actor. Apparently, when developing the series, he looked for someone else to play the part, but he took the part himself because of budget constraints. The result is a gay, disabled actor playing a gay, disabled character.
The series is broadly about a young gay and disabled man living in Southern California. It is well acted and very well written and really, really good. There is so much you could talk about, but I am going to mention one really obscure thing. The character, also named Ryan (the series is autobiographical) lives a financially comfortable life, first with his mother then on his own, in Southern California. At the beginning of the series, he takes an unpaid internship to learn about the world of work. Unpaid. Remember, this is in Southern California, the place with maybe the highest cost of living in the United States (except for possibly Honolulu). He ain’t getting by on his SSI check, that’s for sure. Early in the series, he tells his Mom he can use his “CP money” to live on his own. No, the CP money is not a new generous government program to help people with disabilities live independent and meaningful lives without having to worry about affording things like, say, food and shelter. The CP money consists of the proceeds from a lawsuit against the hospital where he was born for doing something that caused his cerebral palsy. That is great for him, but it begs the question: how do disabled people without their own CP money manage to get buy in a place as expensive as Los Angeles? Heck, it’s hard enough in Louisville. I think the answer is, they don’t.
But the series is well worth watching.
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