In the opening seconds of Special (Netflix), our 21-year-old hero Ryan falls flat on his face on a suburban California sidewalk. After he gets back on his feet, a small boy on a scooter tells him he’s walking funny and needs to go to hospital. Ryan tells him his walk is nothing to do with the fall; he has cerebral palsy.
“Cerebral palsy,” he explains, “is a disability resulting from damage to the brain before, during or shortly after birth, and outwardly manifested through muscular incoordination.” The child screams. From that moment, you know that Special is going to be a little bit special.
The series, created, written by and starring Ryan O’Connell, is based on his 2015 memoir about being a young, gay man living with cerebral palsy in LA, and worrying about his future. “It’s hard out here for a gimp,” Ryan tell his physical therapist. Moments later, as if to prove his point, Ryan gets hit by a car. It’s funny in a way that is also a little distressing. How many more times is he going to get hurt before the end of episode one? And also: stop walking around with headphones on.
In the next scene he’s up and about again, seemingly OK. Ryan, we learn, lives with his overprotective mother, and is just starting a new internship at a millennial website called Eggwoke, which has recently shifted from posting satirical pieces to confessional blogs (“Like ‘50 Ways to Hate Myself’ or ‘Why Do I Keep Finding Things Inside My Vagina?’” says his boss, Olivia) in desperate pursuit of more traffic.
Ryan is soon roped in, producing a successful clickbait essay titled “GETTING HIT BY A CAR WAS FUCKING AWESOME!!!” He also deliberately allows his new colleagues to assume that the accident was the source of his disability, storing up trouble for the future. From what I can gather, by the way, this is all true.
None of this will give you an idea how unbelievably sweet Special is. Most of the people Ryan meets are more supportive and kind than he is prepared to acknowledge. His bad-ass, bitchy office friend Kim (the very funny Punam Patel) has a heart of gold. Adversity arrives in small doses, and the overriding virtue on display here is pluck. Jaded LA is made to seem like a place where Kimmy Schmidt would be counted a cynic.
But it’s also bracingly frank – about disability and independence, about sex and sexuality, even about ageing. A subplot about Ryan’s lonely mother – the magnificent Jessica Hecht – finding love with the retired fireman next door is so touching and well executed it could be its own show.
Ryan makes for a kind of everyman-nerd protagonist – unworldly, awkward, dressed by his mum. “I’m a loser masquerading as a non-loser,” he tells Kim. He sometimes longs for a more marked disability, one that would earn him sympathy without explanation. He has to be reminded how lucky he is.
Special comes at you quick – there are eight episodes, none longer than 15 minutes. The credits between each chapter are truncated so as to facilitate a single, feature-length binge, but the overall effect is not necessarily a cinematic sweep. The dramatic peaks and troughs of Ryan’s coming-of-age story are delivered in a high-frequency, fast-forward buzz. The weakest bits tend to involve flashes of catty wit, or attempts to be savage about life in shallow, status-obsessed southern California, while also gliding merrily along its surface. Those moments seem undeserving of a show that is first and foremost about actual, frail, vulnerable people. Like the fictional website Ryan works for, Special has more success with autobiography than it does with satire.
But maybe that’s the point: this is the author’s hard look at himself and his own shortcomings. In a world ruled by appearances, Ryan is as capable of self-deception as anybody else. Later on in the story, he resents being set up on a blind date with a deaf guy, thinking he can do better.
There are flashes of wit, slapstick, warmth and sadness sown all the way through Special, glinting out at you as the whole thing races by. I ended up watching the entire show in one go, and it would be no hardship to sit down at any point and watch it all again.
