While television executives seemed to make a conscious effort over the past few years to create characters who, by definition, have some kind of disability, the number of people with disabilities on TV in 2015 actually went down.
According to a report by GLAAD, the percentage of people on TV with disabilities had nearly doubled from the 2012-13 season to the 2013-14 season, jumping from 0.6 percent to 1 percent, and then again jumping 40 percent to 1.4 percent during the 2014-15 season.
However, 2015 saw a buck in that trend. This season, eight characters on primetime TV will have a visible or invisible disability — that’s less than 1 percent of all TV characters. Among the networks that best represent the disabled community, FOX leads the way, featuring four regular characters with disabilities ranging from neuromuscular disease myasthenia graves to bipolar disorder. A pair of shows, “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC and “NCIS: New Orleans” on CBS, feature people with disabilities, with one using a prosthetic leg and another bound to a wheelchair.
