Amidst all the business-oriented discussion of whether NBC, which cancelled much of the new programming it tried to introduce last year, can succeed by starting over, going middlebrow, or recreating past hits, there’s one part of the network’s programming decisions that merits mention on the content rather than the financial or audience calculations. The network is remaking Ironside, a show about a detective who uses a wheelchair after he’s shot in the line of duty that ran on NBC for eight seasons between 1967 and 1975. And it’ll be airing The Michael J. Fox show, a sitcom featuring the titular comedian, who did seven years on NBC with Family Ties, which ran from 1982 to 1989, as a news anchor who returns to work despite the way his Parkinson’s Disease, from which Fox suffers in real life. In other words, NBC is putting two shows on air that feature characters with physical limitations, moving a kind of character who’s often relegated to supporting roles—and who’s often there to illustrate the goodness of or provide moral tests to fully able-bodied characters—to the center of the frame. And from the trailers, it looks like both Ironside and The Michael J. Fox show won’t shy away from discussing their characters’ physical limitations, and other people’s reactions to them, directly.

Ironside presents its main character as a man who isn’t limited in his work—or from the trailer—his love life by the fact that he’s had to learn how to use a wheelchair. But the show does look like it’s going to give him something of a chip on his shoulder about it. There’s an interesting moment in the trailer when one of Ironside’s (Blair Underwood) colleagues suggests that he’s demanding for wanting more than the standard, and legally required, accommodations that make it easier for him to maneuver his home and office, and Ironside snaps at him that he was only pursuing what’s due him. It’s nice to see Ironside push back against the idea that people with disabilities need to be saintly exemplars to people who don’t have to use wheelchairs or other adaptive technologies. But it does look like the show might fall into another trope, that of demonstrating just how fully people with disabilities can live their lives, instead of taking that fact for granted. “You really a cripple?” a criminal asks Ironside at one point in the trailer. “You tell me,” Ironside shoots back:

The case of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who has been charged with the shooting murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, has shone a dispiriting light on everything from the horrendous rates of violence against women in South Africa to the media handling of Pistorius, a famous athlete, and Steenkamp, who was a model. But while this is a decidedly minor concern, I’ve found myself thinking about the gap between Pistorius’ legend and what appears to have been the reality of his domestic life alongside the decision by the executive board of the International Olympic Committee to recommend that wrestling be dropped from the games starting in 2020.

The official declaration that one of the foundational sports of the Olympic games doesn’t have enough interest from the public to justify its continued inclusion in the competition, and an accusation of murder against an athlete who transcended the loss of his legs to compete against the best runners without disabilities in the world, may not seem to have much in common. But collectively, they’re an illustration of the financial and commercial stake has in burnishing the reputation of someone like Pistorius.

Because the Olympics—and NBC, which owns the broadcast rights to the games in the United States—can’t trust that extremely large audiences follow many of the sports involved, and thus that they’ll develop rooting interests on the merits, they need something else to pull those viewers in, to help them decide which competitors they’ll back if there are multiple candidates on the American national team, and to help them identify which athletes they’ll root for if no Americans are available. Inspirational stories are the primary mechanism of doing this, and to a certain extent, the main product NBC is actually selling. It may be frustrating to some viewers that life stories and interviews with athletes take up so much broadcast time, and make it harder to broadcast competitions live. But without them, it’s hard to imagine that the ratings of the games would be so high, and thus so financially valuable.

The Olympics and its broadcast partners have a direct financial interest in Oscar Pistorius being an extraordinary young man who transcended the loss of his legs below the knee, rather than someone who had had the police visit his house on multiple occasions because of “domestic incidents.” They have an investment in the idea that competitive ice skaters are nice little girls, rather than women with ex-husbands who solicit assaults on their competitors—Olympic athletes have financial interests, rather than simply national honor, at stake, too. Sometimes those interests mean that the Olympics get behind a useful story, championing someone like Gabby Douglas, and as a result, highlighting the whiteness of that sport, and bringing in new audiences for it. And sometimes it means obscuring what it means to live in some place like South Africa, and the extent to which overcoming some of the limitations his disability placed on him doesn’t mean that Pistorius was somehow exempt from participating in or becoming a victim of the violence, particularly the violence against women, that plague South Africa.

The Olympics were initially supposed to bring the world’s countries together. But it’s one thing to get the nations to set their differences aside and observe a truce, and another to use uniformly cheerful stories about adversity overcome to paper over the differences in where athletes come from, and even their own varied humanity. That anyone’s surprised that an Olympic athlete could end up charged in a domestic violence murder is a testament to the success NBC does in creating a uniform product, and to how deeply and easily we buy into it, over and over again.

The news broke this morning that NBC, which has been making efforts to improve the diversity of its casting, is not only rebooting Ironside, the show about a police detective who uses a wheelchair which debuted for the first time on NBC in 1967, making it the only broadcast network to have a show with a lead with a disability, but is casting Blair Underwood in that lead role, making him the only black male lead on broadcast television. That’s great news, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for the show, but Media Matters’ Oliver Willis raises a good point:

As I told Oliver, one of the reasons Underwood was cast is that NBC has a holding deal with him, which means that he’s committed in advance to work on a set number of projects for them. When networks are casting characters for new shows, it makes sense for them to look to the people they have holding deals with first: it’s a pool of actors they’ve already determined that they like, and that they have incentives to work with immediately to get as much value as they can over those existing deals. It’s one thing for an actor to break in to one role, but another one entirely for a network to decide that they want to be in the Blair Underwood business, or the Vanessa Williams business, in a genuine and long-term way.

In other words, if television is to get more diverse, we need more actors of color who are not just breaking in as one-time things, but who are being treated like franchise players. I’m encouraged by the news that Echo Kellum, who was wonderfully winsome and funny on the now-cancelled Ben & Kate has already found work again on NBC’s The Gates. Television isn’t going to start looking like the United States if there’s only a tiny pool of actors of color who have been stamped network-approved.

Over at The New Republic earlier this week, I wrote about how FX’s new comedy Legit, which premieres tonight at 10:30, encapsulates an underlying theme that animates all of the network’s programming: what does it mean to be a legitimate and successful American man? While not ever FX watcher is loyal to the network’s entire lineup, if you drop in on its comedies and dramas, you’ll find men dealing with everything from how to be better fathers to their children than their own were, coping with the consequences of sexual double-standards, and grappling with downward mobility or weaker economic positions than their partners. Legit, an enormously agreeable show that’s simultaneously sweeter and tarter than many of FX’s offerings, fits in that formula and expands it in some exciting new directions.

Legit has a relatively simple premise: a stand-up comic, Jim (stand-up comedian Jim Jeffries), who lives with his divorced friend Steve (Second City alumn Dan Bakkedahl), who he met when Jim came to live with Steve’s family as an exchange student (Steve tells his mother, who hates Jim, at one point that “I wanted a Swedish female!”), decides to become more “legitimate,” with a vague sense of what that might mean. But he finds some purpose when Steve encourages Jim to reconnect with Steve’s younger brother Billy (DJ Qualls), who has muscular dystrophy, and who is confined to an assisted-living facility. Deciding that Billy, who is 31, has been overly coddled and needs to experience more of life, Jim first takes it upon himself to break Billy out of the facility for occasional adventure, and then decides to move Billy in with him and Steve and begin caring for him. The show, run by Peter O’Fallon, starts off a bit rough around the edges. But it grows quickly in its first couple of episodes, and Legit‘s portrayal of both life with disability and the friendships among maturing men has the potential to be something special.

To start with, it’s very funny. Many of the stories are drawn directly from Jeffries’ experiences with his friend with muscular dystrophy or O’Fallon’s helping to care for his father, who died of ALS. Much of the punch of Jim’s stories comes from his character’s utter lack of social awareness. Sometimes, he’s hilariously entitled, spinning out a fantasy about having a child with a terminally ill woman who will die once their child is old enough to get him beers from the fridge, saving him from having to be a good husband, and guaranteeing that his child will always be grateful. And in other moments, that lack of respect for social norms mean Jim’s capable of caring for Billy without inhibition, whether he’s helping the other man urinate because he’s decided the bottle Billy uses is a genius invention, or helping him through the awkwardnesses of Skpye dates and cybersex. Jim may believe that Billy’s going to be the perfect wing man, and that taking him out and helping him develop a social life may mean that he’s “going to get so much pussy.” But despite his frattish inclinations, Jim spends a lot more time hanging out with Billy at home than taking him out and making use of him. If selfishness set Jim on his quest to become legitimate, it seems that once he’s started visiting Billy again, Jim finds himself in it for the pure enjoyment of Billy’s company—and the joy of tweaking Billy’s mother, Janice.

Steve is an appealing straight man to Jim’s wildness, and an ongoing illustration of the limitations of Jim’s approach to life, and the practical realities of caring for someone with muscular dystrophy. When the two men take Billy on an exuberant road trip to a Nevada brothel so he can lose his virginity, they deposit him in a room with a cheerful prostitute (and Jeffries real-life girlfriend), only for Steve to realize that he’s forgotten to undress his brother. After Jim hands out dating tips to Steve and Billy, Steve initially finds success with an attractive woman from his office by complimenting her eyes, only to end up stuck with variations on that theme after he finds he doesn’t have anything else to talk to her about. Good intentions and low inhibitions aren’t enough, as it turns out, to navigate every situation or to negotiate a truly fulfilling life.
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I agree that Hollywood often does a rather sappy job when it tries to tell stories about people with disabilities, but unlike Ian Buckwalter, writing on The Sessions, which I reviewed in February (when it had a different title), I don’t actually think the answer is that our depictions of disability need to get more despairing:

There’s no rule that says the tougher film has to be the better one, but the problem with Intouchables and The Sessions is that they achieve their sunny dispositions by pulling punches. Any hint of difficulty is immediately tempered so as not to upset the lightly comedic tone of both films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in The Sessions when a power outage causes a failure in the iron lung that allows Mark to breathe. While it’s in character for the devoutly Catholic Mark to greet potential death with the same beatific acceptance he carries through much of the rest of his life, that doesn’t mean the film can’t recognize the dire nature of the circumstances. This should be a tense moment, but The Sessions refuses to acknowledge highs and lows, tension and release. It flatlines from start to finish, even if Mark doesn’t.

Audiard strikes a better balance in Rust and Bone, demonstrating that one can take a pat inspirational story and infuse it with the hardship required to make that inspiration feel earned. Following the loss of her legs, Stéphanie is nearly as defeated as the stroke victim of Amour. As a whale trainer, she makes her living on her feet, and her character’s despair is palpable. More importantly, Audiard makes it impossible to turn away from that despair, unlike the glossed-over expository conversations in Intouchables and Sessions about how their characters dealt with that loss.

The thing is, there’s a difference between a story about someone learning to cope with a newly-acquired disability, and a story about someone with a disability doing something else, like having sex or falling in love. In that first category of story, the goal of the movie is presumably to communicate to a majority able-bodied audience that their negative expectations for what their lives would be like if they suddenly lost, say, the ability to walk, aren’t accurate or complete, and that joy, love, and physical pleasure are still possible. As much as I dislike the idea that movies about people with disabilities need be tragic, I understand why these categories of films include that register of emotions, because they’re a way of hooking in audiences who fear the idea of grave accidents or infections that suddenly change their capacities.

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and em>The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

And I don’t see why a movie like that has to be dark, or despairing. In fact, way the arcs for a lot of the best sex stories work is that there’s a lot of anticipation, and then an anti-climax, rather than an enormous climb and an inspiring victory. The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends with relatively brief sex and a goofy sing-a-long: the emotional work’s done, the victory achieved. Rats Saw God, one of my favorite young adult novels, actually draws some wonderful drama from the main characters’ reactions to the first time they have sex: the fact that it isn’t a transformational experience leaves them feeling confused and somewhat alienated from each other. In The Sessions, the obstacles are Mark’s anxieties, premature ejaculation, his desire to give pleasure as well as to feel it. These are not the things of triumph-over-disability movies: they’re things that a lot of us experience, and Mark’s confinement to his iron lung is the particular thing that inflects his journey through them. But that doesn’t make these experiences and emotions unimportant—if anything, that Mark is concerned with giving pleasure even though it’s harder for him to, say, touch his partner, makes him a hero in comparison to less thoughtful people, whether they have physical limitations or none at all. Sex comedies shouldn’t have to automatically move into a tragic key because a person with a disability is involved in them. Rather, how persons with disabilities—not all of whom acquire those conditions dramatically or suddenly—navigate circumstances that they share with those of us who don’t have disabilities tells us about the universality of those experiences, rather than offering testaments to the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s something disquieting about the idea that the only uses of characters with disabilities should be to provide those testaments. As with, say, gay characters, telling stories about difference is only a first order accomplishment when it comes to diversity. By all means, tell stories about what it means to suddenly move into the ranks of people with disabilities, the legions of wheelchair users. But remember that people are born with disabilities too, and people who have disabilities do far more with their lives than accommodate themselves to the limitations and difficulties they face.