Disabled Actors Deserve To Blend Into The Background, Too

Towards the end of the first episode of Netflix’s newest Harlan Coben series, “Fool Me Once,” I animatedly turned to my wife and shouted “Look! A wheelchair user!” The scene was a backyard picnic, with two shots of a character in her wheelchair, and a few other shots where her wheelchair was not visible. It certainly wasn’t a moment calling for an Emmy, but the simplicity of it is precisely why I was so enthusiastic.

Released at the top of the year, “Fool Me Once” is an eight-part British television series by Quay Street Productions as part of a multimillion dollar, five-year contract that Coben signed with the streaming service Netflix. Under the deal, Coben will serve as executive producer to adapt 14 of his novels into Netflix Originals. The show follows Maya Stern, played by Michelle Keegan, a recently widowed woman who is looking into the mystery of how her recently murdered husband appears in her nanny-cam footage several weeks after his funeral.

It has gone on to become the ninth most-watched Netflix series of all time with 92.1 million viewers as of last week. Like most of Coben’s work on Netflix, the show is full of twists and plenty of long-hidden secrets. But thankfully, disability isn’t the source of either of these.

My level of excitement may have been a bit much for such a small moment in such a large-scale production, but I’ve become very well attuned to such things. I’m a wheelchair user myself, an actor, and a professor of theater who studies portrayals of disability. So I eagerly watched to see whether this wheelchair-using character would appear again in the series.

But she didn’t.

Ironically, this made me all the more appreciative of the moment. A wheelchair-user being cast as an extra is in many