FILLING IN THE PICTURE

RYAN O’CONNELL LIKENS HIS NEW SHOW, SPECIAL, to an Ariana Grande song—which is to say, it’s pop. It’s not Stravinsky or Coltrane; it’s not, as he puts it, “some lo-fi mumble core sh-t.” The semi-autobiographical series he wrote and stars in, about an introverted millennial struggling to move out of his mom’s house and become a writer, is conventional. Most of its episodes have an A plot and a B plot. There’s a plucky protagonist and a lovable sidekick.

But ahead of its April 12 debut on Netflix, there are many for whom Special is so much more than your average sitcom. The series marks the biggest stage in recent memory for a creator with a disability—and an unprecedented platform that puts him in control of the storytelling. “I’m excited that people are saying, ‘I’ve never seen this before,’” says O’Connell, who has cerebral palsy (CP), over the phone from Los Angeles. “But part of me is also like, Why? We should have seen this 40 million years ago.”

In recent years, conversations about representation in Hollywood have increased in urgency, from #OscarsSoWhite to the whitewashing of Asian