The world is not exactly a kind, forgiving place.
That won’t comes as a newsflash to pretty much anyone, but what might come as an epiphany of sorts, especially if you’re the kind of person lacking in the kind of self-awareness necessary for any kind of truly-fulfilling life, is how much worse we can make it through our own actions.
Not deliberately, of course; no one, and I realise that is a rampant generalisation, is not existentially masochistic.
But it often takes us a while to get a grip on what is good and bad about us, and to take steps to amplify the former and seek to remediate the latter.
Someone who’s just begun down that road is Ryan Hayes (creator and writer Ryan O’Connell), a gay man who has cerebral palsy, a co-dependent mother, Karen (Jessica Hecht), a new bestie, Kim (Punam Patel) and internship at viral-hungry website eggwoke, run by the gloriously self-involved Olivia (Marla Mindelle), and after years under his mother’s overly-protective wing, his own home.
In eight, 15 minutes-or-fewer, episodes, Ryan has to grapple with what each of their significant milestones mean to a man who is suddenly, and painfully aware, that might just be a little “fucked up”.
Welcome to the world, Ryan.
Watching him come to grips with his internalised ableism – when he joins eggwork he tells everyone that his physicality is due to a car accident, not cerebral palsy; the accident does happen but the injuries, of course, are not the cause of his disability, a fact that only begins to emerge later in the promising but all too short first season when Ryan begins to understanding that wholly embracing who you are is not as scary as he first imagined.
To begin with though, as he tries to impress Olivia with the fact that he has what it takes to land an actual job, he is happy to trade on this falsehood, not simply because it provides him with considerable fodder for viral posts, but because it relieves him of the imagined burden of coming clean.
He is convinced that ‘fessing up would unleash the kind of rejection and kindly condescension he has struggled all his life and while that might be true in part, the reality is that not coming clean comes with messy consequences of its own.
This is where much of the humour stems from as Ryan comes to grips, just he once made peace with his sexuality, with the reality that people are more more complicated, including himself, that he gives them credit for.
Like all of us, how he imagines the world, and the people in it, and more particularly, around him, is not fully, or at times even partially, reflective of reality, and his attempts to mould it to his perceived bias, only ends making things worse.
Unless, naturally, it doesn’t.
Written with good humour and an almost-painful level of honesty at times – O’Connell was a writer on Awkward and Will and Grace among other shows – Special is a show that knows to press the surrealist button to make some very grounded, uncomfortably self-aware but nevertheless very funny points.
Olivia, for instance, is fabulously over-the-top, a woman self-involved to the point of cruelty, to herself and others, who stages her own birthday parties, populated by gorgeously-vacuous people, where she sings happy birthday to herself while everyone watches and where the cake is a prop only, the idea of eating anathema to the beautiful LA people who make up her friendship-free universe.
She is thus the perfect person to run a site like eggwoke, where personal misfortune and failings, and rampant misjudgement, are not life lessons so much as they are the origin point for narcissistically-selfish pieces of superficial reflection.
The object is not so much coming to some sort of road to Damascus epiphany as it is to compel prurient readers to deep-dive into the sorts of stories that make them feel better about their own lacking lives.
That Ryan, awash in all kinds of entrenched insecurity and un-admitted self-loathing should end working them feels strangely poetic and yet, it is not the driver of the small but important changes he undergoes in Special‘s first season.
The honour of being that catalyst falls to new bestie Kim, but more importantly, his mum, Karen, who has to grapple with challenges of her own as she realise that the son she loves is also the source of unexplored and unarticulated resentment.
Kim, who gravitates to Ryan because of an honesty she feels is absent in everyone else she knows – he is, of course, not as honest as he first appears, not once but twice as it turns out, testing their nascent bestie-ness – is the one who compels him to confront who he is in the context of friendships and relationships, especially a hoped-for one with the handsome, charismatic and sweet Carey (Augustus Prew), Kim’s close friend and one of the people who accepts Ryan for who he is without a single condition.
But it’s his mum, played with a beautiful mix of parental love and weary vulnerability by Hecht who triggers many of Ryan’s major breakthroughs and who is the source, as all parents are, of both his enabling and his holding back, at least in part.
As always though, since once you’re an adult, the weight of choice and responsibility is on you, it’s Ryan who, whatever his influences, has to deal with his flaws and deficiencies, but also more positively, the idea that he might be attractive and worthwhile as a person, no matter what he’s internalised.
Watching his journey, with all its snarky wit, vulnerability and genuine joy in finding himself, is a real pleasure – even if the episodes sometimes appear to be gathering a head of steam before they end – and with a cliffhanger of sorts in the offing, it will be interesting to see where the series goes in season 2, should the Netflix gods be so kind to us.