In the US: Wednesdays, 8.30/7.30c, ABC. Starts September 21
In the past few years, ABC – already the home of a considerable amount of female-oriented programming – has been doing its best to diversify its diversity, through shows such as black-ish, Quantico, Fresh Off The Boatand Cristela. With Speechless, it’s now trying its hand at disabilities.
Minnie Driver, forever consigned these days to the role of ‘spunky mum’ (cf About A Boy), is a spunky mother of three kids, one of whom (Micah Fowler) has cerebral palsy, is wheelchair-bound and can only communicate with an assistive device. Forever spunky, Driver spunkily drags her family from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, new house to new house and school to school, in an effort to find the perfect location for her differently abled son – a location that might offer a full-time assistant who can act as her son’s ‘voice’.
Like Son of Zorn, it’s a high concept that sounds a bit awful on paper, but actually works much better in practice thanks to a diversity of diversity and a nuanced approach. While the show is happy to have Driver lecture everyone about correct language, the eventual ‘voice’ for her son (Cedric Yarbrough) is black and there’s a tension between him and Driver about whether being black is a bigger disadvantage than being disabled in the upmarket, virtually all-white neighbourhood in which Driver and family end up.
The school might want to celebrate diversity and achievement, particularly the ‘brave’ Fowler, but Fowler doesn’t think he’s actually done anything to be celebrated. Neither does the faculty know how to talk to him and the handicapped access ramp also doubles as the garbage ramp.
Meanwhile, the daughter of the family Driver is a keen athlete who’s fed up with everything being celebrated as being special, when she’d rather just win by being the best at something. Driver’s spunkiness is seen as being as much a problem for the family as it is an asset. On top of that, middle son just wants some attention, too, being tired of all the attention Fowler gets and the constant upheaval.
Speechless has some obvious flaws and potential problems ahead of it. The father of the family (John Ross Bowie) is amusingly long-suffering and the show does its very level best to make him interesting in his own right. But Bowie doesn’t have a fraction of Driver’s presence or energy, and the character has no real desires of his own, making his presence almost superfluous to requirements.
And as with black-ish, there’s going to come a point, probably quite soon, where the show runs out of ‘profound and important’ things to say about disability and diversity, and has to stand on the strength of its characters and situations. At the moment, I can’t quite see the show managing to do that, and it’ll likely very quickly revert to being any other family comedy.
All the same, a surprisingly good first episode that smartly addresses topical issues, and worth a try.
I don’t know exactly where Mattel and Filmation lie within the many concentric circles of giant US conglomerates’ IP assets, but if they’re not contained at least somewhere within Fox, I think the creators of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe have a good copyright infringement case on their hands with the arrival of Son of Zorn.
Zorn’s the guy in the picture above; He-Man is the guy in the 80s cartoon below.
Somewhat similar artistically, I think you’ll agree.
However, that’s probably about the only similarity the two have in common, beyond an oddly similar array of friends, because Zorn owes a lot more to He-Man’s own inspiration, Conan the Barbarian, than to He-Man. He’s a macho, manly kind of guy who’ll only take orders from a woman if he believes she’s really a man.
That’s possibly why he ended up getting divorced and returning to his cartoon island nation to fight demons, giants, et al, while his wife (Cheryl Hines from Suburgatory and Curb Your Enthusiasm) headed off to Orange County, California, to raise their son, Alangulon, by herself. When Zorn returns to Orange County to see his now-teenage son and discovers that Hines is getting married to online professor of psychology Tim Meadows (Mean Girls), he decides to remain in Orange County as a detergent salesman so he can woo back his wife and become a father again.
Coming from Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Last Man on Earth, The Lego Movie), it’s unsurprising that this is a good deal funnier than you might expect – and you might be expecting Kröd Mändoon. While this is basically no different to any other culture clash or squabbling exes comedy – or even to Last Man Standing– with Zorn having to learn to be sensitive and fit in with modern American mores to have a relationship with his wife, it’s less about the format and more about the detail with Son of Zorn.
Zorn’s not just a huge dick with a huge sword, he’s a huge dick with a huge sword and access to death hawks. He’s also a ‘diversity hire’, barbarians from island nations being something of a rarity in California. Alan(gulon)’s a vegetarian and can flirt with the best of them, but he would be better with the girls if he had his own car… or death hawk. Hines’s character is trying to be responsible but is also someone who was happy to hang out with a barbarian and have sex with mountain trolls when she was younger. And Meadows’ character is hyper self-aware, particularly of the fact he’s a big disappointment in life and that Zorn is just big, giving an almost Ben Carson-like deadpan performance of oddness.
A lot of the jokes are obvious and you can usually see where everything’s going. But Son of Zorn keeps coming back with sufficiently out-there jokes that it doesn’t seem matter. Worth trying, at least for an episode or two.
