The Sitcom (about a Disabled Muslim Woman) that Could Have Been

Comedian Maysoon Zayid had a deal to develop a sitcom for ABC. The deal made headlines, but the show never aired. She tells all about the bigotry behind the scenes.

Comedian Maysoon Zayid in 2015 (from Wikipedia)

The sitcom deal of her dreams (and ours)

Maysoon Zayid was already a successful comedian when she got a deal to create a sitcom for ABC. She had co-founded a comedy festival, appeared in an Adam Sandler comedy, given guest commentary on MSNBC, and given a Ted Talk that was watched by millions around the world. The show was supposed to be inspired by her life, a Muslim woman with cerebral palsy, and she was supposed to be its star.

Maysoon’s deal was a long time coming. A decade ago, you could count on two hands the number of people with visible disabilities having success in Hollywood. Actors like Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox got heart-warming People magazine cover stories about their disability struggles instead of chances to continue their craft. Fox starred in an NBC sitcom briefly about having Parkinson’s that was pulled off of the air mid-season, despite mostly positive reviews. While Hollywood hasn’t generally made room for disabled actors and performers until recently (and still very little), the 90s and 2000s were a heyday for non-disabled actors impersonating disability in corny melodramas to win awards and nominations.

So it was a big deal for the disability community when, in 2018, it was reported in Deadline and Variety that Maysoon was developing a sitcom entitled “Can-Can.” It would include a disabled actor playing a disabled character. It was also going to give us comedy instead of the usual syrupy inspiration porn.

I always wondered what happened to ”Can-Can,” because it never aired. Finally, I got the chance to ask Maysoon, when I interviewed her for the “Bubble People Podcast.” I anticipated that she might share a little about it; I know people to be careful when they talk about Hollywood stories, because of contractual restrictions or fear of losing future career opportunities.

I was lucky that Maysoon was in no mood to be careful.

“Sex in the City,” but disabled and Muslim

Maysoon shared about the sitcom she wrote and pitched all over Hollywood after her Ted Talk. It centered around the lead character’s relationship with her father, a conservative Muslim, who wanted her to marry a Muslim man. Some of it sounded ridiculous in the best way: “Her father imports a starving refugee, and he starts tracking her on her iPhone so that he can throw the refugee in her path,” Maysoon explained. “And she thinks that it’s destiny and serendipity.” The lead character was also in love with a non-Muslim, her best friend’s brother. So we would get a love triangle.

This would’ve been refreshing in terms of disability representation. In the first “Bubble People” episode, author Kristen Lopez talked about how disabled women are usually portrayed by Hollywood as non-sexual beings. We rarely get one love interest, let alone two. Maysoon compared the lead character in the sitcom she wrote to Carrie on “Sex in the City,” in terms of her romantic adventures.

Maysoon also wanted her lead character to be career-driven. She initially wrote her as a Zagat’s restaurant reviewer, which would put the character in different scenarios that could be funny. I’ve been interviewing disabled people for the podcast about what they want to see in film and TV, and they almost all describe wanting to see complicated characters whose disability isn’t the only defining aspect of their lives.

Sadly, Maysoon’s vision wasn’t accepted by the production team that bought her script. She sold the show to the company co-run by Sean Hayes (of “Will and Grace”) and Todd Milliner. They paired her with a writer named Joanna who was “a murderer of all things funny,” as Maysoon described her (quoting her friend Lexi Alexander). Maysoon was also assigned to work with a producer named Todd, who apparently had similarly unfortunate comedic instincts.

As an example, Maysoon remembers them wanting the lead character to stand on the bow of a ferry screaming, “I have cerebral palsy!” a la “Titanic.” (I say no more.)

As an aside, Hollywood does this kind of pairing often. Studios and production companies imagine that they will create magic if they pair someone who has raw talent/lived experience with someone who is a formulaic script writer. In Maysoon’s case—and all too often—the pairing ends up just neutering the raw talent and experience.

It’s part of a broader cultural issue in the media: people who have real-life experience are seen as unreliable narrators of that experience. It’s why journalists are often considered biased if they have experienced the kind of abuse they investigate and document. The underlying thought is that marginalized people need less marginalized people to translate our experiences to the mainstream, as if the mainstream isn’t filled with marginalized people desperate for authentic representation.

Anyway, the team assigned to help Maysoon develop her sitcom didn’t just turn it into bland Hollywood entertainment. They turned it into what sounds to me like hateful content against disabled women and Muslims.

“Every negative stereotype”

Maysoon’s partners on the sitcom wanted her character to be as pathetic as possible. Instead of a love triangle with two romantic prospects, she should “just pine after the best friend and have it be unrequited,” Maysoon said. They also wanted the character to be a low-level fact checker instead of a Zagat reviewer.

And why? There’s nothing pathetic about Maysoon Zayid. In her Ted Talk, in writings and interviews, she has always emphasized strength, possibility, and being assertive. She was already very successful when she got the deal. It’s also not a rule of comedy that characters have to be pathetic. By the 2010s, there had been plenty of hilarious, successful, and romantically engaged lead women characters on television. Some of them were even racially marginalized, like Mindy in “The Mindy Project.”

So why did Maysoon’s character have to be a loser in career and love? Could it be that these Hollywood script masters couldn’t see a disabled woman otherwise?

According to Maysoon, they were pretty explicit about this bias: “They said that if my character was too successful, she would make normal people feel bad. So what was my character, if not normal? Was I a freak? Was I meant to make non disabled people feel good?”

In our interview, Maysoon described how she resisted being their “token disabled puppet.” She told an ever darkening story of bigotry in alleged comedy (ironically, as the room darkened around her. If I were an experienced video-podcaster, I might have interrupted her and asked her to turn on a light; I was afraid that she might stop sharing.)

Then her story became wretchedly dark. According to Maysoon, “They wanted my character when she got hyped up to wear pink boxing gloves and stand in the mirror and box.” She pointed out how the “resting position” for a lot of people with cerebral palsy is holding the hands “like a kangaroo,” close to the upper chest.

“They wanted something I couldn’t do that made me look unsavory, that made me feel unattractive.” She had suggested something she could do, like tap dancing, to hype herself up.

“As I said, I’m not precious. Like I was great with my character falling into a gutter. I’m totally fine with that, right? But doing things that played up the grotesqueness of the palsy is not who I am.” She shared about how everyone wants that “magazine cover” of a person with cerebral palsy in that kangaroo-hands position, but “that’s just not me.”

According to Maysoon, the producers were just as bad about leaning into “disgusting, reductive, animalistic stereotypes of Muslims” in the portrayal of her father. It would have been the first well-developed Muslim family on scripted U.S. television, and the producers were unwilling to credit Maysoon with the expertise to portray them realistically, without stereotypes.

“I had all the wrong people, and nobody was on my side. Nobody fought for me,” she said. Her team encouraged her to “say yes” and then fix the show in the future, but it was “so far gone” that it couldn’t be steered away from offensive content, she felt.

So Maysoon walked away. She told the production company that she wouldn’t play the role. She does express regret for the opportunity she lost to be on a network TV show. At the same time, she recognizes that “Ramy,” on Netflix, was able to succeed because it was on streaming. It didn’t require ABC/Disney-fication.

“They always say, the first person through the door gets shot,” she said, referring to the opportunities that have since come for some disabled actors. And she recognizes that it would be even harder for her now, given that she is Palestinian.

Today, Maysoon produces her own talk show, DISCO, and recently published a graphic novel, Shiny Misfits, about a character with cerebral palsy who tap dances.

Maysoon’s is not the only story I’ve heard like this about Hollywood. Most of the people I’ve known that had Hollywood deals had to compromise their visions beyond recognition. I had my own documentary on Freddie Gray’s death turned into something unrelated to the investigation I’d worked on for years. I, too, was partnered with the wrong people, who were committed to an establishment narrative. Their version showed favoritism towards the people who covered up Freddie’s murder. It was also not released. It’s hard to get compromised stories finished or released; they have no appeal.

Hollywood has a long history of not respecting artists or marginalized people—and especially those in combination. But how will they know if these stories can perform in the marketplace, if they aren’t given a real shot? I believe we are still owed a comedy from Maysoon, and I hope it happens.