By BA Haller© Media dis&dat"Abnormal IS the new normal" - that's the themeRyan Murphy's new NBC show "The New Normal," which is about a gaycouple wanting to become Dads and their surrogate and her family.
Murphy, creator of “Nip/Tuck” and “Glee,” alwaysrepresents some disability or physical difference in his shows and this onefollows that structure. On the one hand,"Nip/Tuck" had a story arc starring the talented LP actor Peter Dinklage as a manny (male nanny), whodiscusses acceptance when a baby on theshow was born with a physical difference. On the other hand, Murphy isresponsible for "Glee," where a non-disabled actor plays wheelchair user Artie, much to the dislike of many people in the disability community.
A little person (played by Debbie Lee Carrington) appears 6 minutes into the pilot episode of "The New Normal." When the gay couple on the show utters thatquote above, it is after a playground scene featuring a mother who is a littleperson with her non-LP daughter. Her statements have a taint of self-hatred,and her husband, who isn’t a little person, comes off as the “good guy.”
She says, “My husband’s regular sized, so there’s a 50percent chance my daughter would be a part-time Christmas elf like me. I toldmy husband, we didn’t have to have kids. We didn’t have to risk it. My husbandsays he loves me, so why wouldn’t she be loved in this world.
As she and her daughter climb into a child’s Barbie car,she says with a smile: “She’s going to be taller than me this year.”
Cut to the gay couple, David, played by Justin Bartha,and Bryan, played by Andrew Rannells, who says: “Face it, honey. Abnormal ISthe new normal.”
Did the LP mom and her daughter really have to drive away in a pink Barbie car?This doesn’t bode well for how other characters with disabilities or physicaldifferences will fare.
That scene pretty muchsums up how a Ryan Murphy show goes - sometimes it makes a great point aboutacceptance and other times it plays on horrible stereotypes.
The show has been attacked already by some conservatives,and a Mormon-affiliated station in Utah, KSL, says it won’t air it.
NBC responded to that censorship saying the show makes "a statementabout the changing definition of the nuclear family."
"The show is against bigotry and hatred in every form and will makethat point whenever characters say outrageous or unacceptable things aboutrace, religion, sexual identity, disability, or tolerance of people outside thedefinitions of `normal,'" the network said in a statement Sept. 10.
The other cast members areGeorgia King, who plays single mom, surrogate hopeful Goldie, and her youngdaughter Shania is played by Bebe Wood. To ramp up more stereotypes, NeNe Leakes plays an over-the-top sassyassistant to the Bryan character, and Ellen Barkin plays Goldie’s grandmother,who spews bigoted remarks in every line of dialogue.
My biggest fear about the show is that in trying to satirize people who makebigoted statements, it lends a kind of back-handed acceptability to people whoactually are racist, homophobic, ableist, sizeist, etc. That is a “new normal”we can all do without.
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