Disabling Stereotypes for Children

Linda Ellerbee, author, raconteur and former network anchor and correspondent, saved her best, most meaningful work for kids.

Ellerbee is host and producer of Nickelodeon’s weekly “Nick News” for the young set, a valuable series whose topics have ranged from AIDS to the Oklahoma City bombing. In addition, Ellerbee creates quarterly “Nick News” specials, the latest of which--featuring resilient Christopher Reeve and “Dateline NBC” correspondent John Hockenberry--airs Tuesday and explores disabilities under the title “What Are You Staring At?”

One of the points here is that those with disabilities should be treated neither as freaks nor as feeble, a message previously delivered on adult programs but perhaps never so forthrightly on a show specifically designed for kids to watch with their families.

Coincidentally, “What Are You Staring At?” is a title that also applies to Sunday’s “King of the Hill” on Fox, an oft-funny episode of the increasingly popular animated series in which 12-year-old Bobby’s pudgy roundness becomes an issue for himself and his Arlen, Texas, family. Although not necessarily a disability, fatness, too, frequently draws stares and even ridicule, as “King of the Hill” notes uniquely.

Bobby seems blissfully on his way to becoming a super-model for H. Dumpty, a clothing store tailored to “plus-sized” boys. But his father, Hank, objects to his modeling fat-boy fashions for an audience, hoping to spare Bobby the hurt he experienced as a boy when called “fatty” by the other kids.

Hank wryly tells his disappointed son when forbidding him to model: “One day you’ll understand how much love it takes to crush a little boy’s dream.” Perhaps reflecting the reality of families, the episode has gaps in logic and ends ambiguously, making it possible to read Hank’s actions as both caring and cruel. But he makes his memory of his own youthful corpulence resonate with twangy authority: “Kids always victimize the one who’s different.”

Some of the young participants in Nickelodeons’s “What Are You Staring At?” possibly can attest to that. This swell, empowering little show speaks candidly to youngsters without patronizing them, while profiling a blind fifth-grader and reviewing pros and cons of federal laws covering disabilities.

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Much of the half hour, though, consists of kids with a variety of disabilities chatting about themselves and their feelings with Ellerbee, Reeve (paralyzed from the neck down in an equestrian accident two years ago) and Hockenberry (in a wheelchair since his injury in a car crash at age 19).

They include a boy with Down syndrome, a blind girl with cerebral palsy and another girl with cerebral palsy who is wise and forceful well beyond her 11 years, expressing strong opinions about biases facing kids growing to adulthood with disabilities: “Getting a job will be hard because people at businesses and big companies just think that disabled people will louse everything up.”

Reeve certainly has loused up nothing, returning to productive work as a director and actor with stunning speed and grit since his terrible fall from his horse. Nor has Hockenberry, a first-rate journalist whose service as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio and ABC News amazingly took him and his wheelchair to some of the globe’s most volatile hot spots.

Perhaps most impressive here is the way “What Are You Staring At?” treats its subjects respectfully but also honestly, without sugarcoating. A boy on the program recalls dreaming about taking a pill and growing a new arm to replace the one he lost. “But when I woke up,” he adds, “it was just a dream.”

From Ellerbee once more, a plus-sized effort for a pint-sized audience.

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DISABLED BY RATINGS: It’s that time of year. The first major ratings period of the new season is upon us, and cancellation notices are probably in the mail for several new shows destined to join the already expelled “Built to Last” on NBC, “Head Over Heels” on UPN and “Timecop,” “You Wish” and “Over the Top” on ABC.

They come and go just that fast, and that doesn’t include this season’s slow-starting new shows dispatched to the uncertain limbo-land of hiatus.

Meaning that the TV industry just can’t get it right? Hardly.

The glass-is-half-empty crowd often makes the mistake of interpreting low ratings for individual programs as failure on the part of the industry, an indication that programmers are out of touch with America.

Instead, the glass is equally half full.

When new series fail to dent the audiences of incumbents, for example, it’s reasonable to conclude that viewers are so pleased with their present options that they’ve no wish to switch. In other words, low-in-the-Nielsens newcomers are failing because higher-in-the-Nielsens oldies are not failing. Thus, when it comes to attracting the masses, someone somewhere must be doing something reasonably right, even though the overall audience for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox continues to slip in an era when Americans have increasingly more viewing choices at their disposal.

This is reality, not apologist talk. If one end of a teeter-totter rises, the opposite end goes down. For every commercial success in TV, there has to be a commercial flop, or at least a much lower level of success. Unless someone invents a way for everyone to watch everything simultaneously--on a TV screen offering a fly’s-eye view through a thousand-plus tiny prisms, perhaps--it will remain mathematically impossible for every show to be a hit. Or, in the free-enterprise bazaar of U.S. television, for every show to be sufficiently profitable to survive.

Now, if everything were reversed, and scads of new shows were knocking off old ones in the ratings, the glass-is-half-empty folks would label that an industry failure too, because viewers then would be rejecting the status quo. The full-glass rebuttal would be that it makes no difference, new programs or old, as long as the nation continues to watch.

Albeit in lower numbers when it comes to ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. It’s a drainage these networks may never be able to plug--no matter how creatively they program--given the public’s growing inclination to snack off broadcasting’s and cable’s ever-widening menu.

* “King of the Hill” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox (Channel 11). “What Are You Staring At?” airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon.