….
It was the last week of November, and Regal had not slept a full night in eleven days.
[The Dark Knight] was in its second phase of pre-production.
[John Wick] was in shooting space.
The Florida theme park had a concrete supplier who had missed two consecutive delivery windows and a project manager who was handling it badly.
There were three meetings on his calendar for tomorrow that should have been emails, and one email in his inbox that should have been a phone call, and somewhere in the middle of all of it–
His television show was airing its final episode tonight.
…and it was not [Friends], this show announced itself to the world with the particular confidence of something that knew exactly what it was.
People had understood Friends immediately, it had the grammar of things people already loved; ensemble, dialogue-driven, warm, familiar.
[Mr. Bean] had been none of those things.
At least, that had been the assumption.
….
When the project had been greenlit back in July, the trades had covered it with the specific tone journalists use when they're being professionally neutral about something they privately find strange.
["Regal's next TV project will be a solo vehicle for British comedian Rowan Atkinson, described as near-dialogue-free."]
A few entertainment blogs had been less measured.
After Friends, this? The comment sections had done what comment sections do.
Even people who trusted Regal's instincts had found it difficult to construct a confident argument for a show built around a single character who didn't really talk.
It was so far from the [Friends] template that it almost seemed like a deliberate provocation.
But it wasn't, Regal had simply read the pitch, watched Atkinson's performance, and said yes.
And then as they already know the project landed in the hands of Chris Columbus.
….
The first episode had aired in March; just before [The Incredible Hulk] film dropped, when the industry's attention was pointed elsewhere and nobody was expecting much from a quiet comedy about a man who didn't speak.
The initial reaction had been warm and cautious, and people weren't sure what to make of it.
By episode three, they were sure.
...and as it continued on episode eight, the show had done something that almost nothing does; it had become genuinely universal.
Not popular-universal, where the numbers are large but the audience is specific, but an actual one.
Attracting all the age categories from children to grandparents.
It crossed language barriers in a way that even subtitled foreign-language hits didn't, because it didn't need the subtitles in the first place.
The humor lived entirely in Atkinson's body, in Columbus's framing, in the precise and merciless logic of a man moving through a world that never quite accommodated him and never quite broke him either.
Twenty-four episodes.
It was initially planned as a fourteen-episode show, but later expanded to that count, with a break after the fourteenth episode to reorganize and adjust the production.
That's one of the reasons why this show lasted this long when it was supposed to end a lot earlier.
Each one landed harder than the last, somehow, which was not supposed to be how television worked.
The critical response had gone from warm to effusive to something beyond effusive that the critics hadn't quite developed vocabulary for yet.
The audience response had gone from curious to devoted in roughly the span of a month and had not looked back since. The show had been picked up in territories that American television rarely penetrated, dubbed into languages that had no equivalent for what it was doing and hadn't needed one.
And tonight was the finale, episode twenty-four; the last one.
….
Five people, in different rooms, were feeling it more than the rest.
Elara Vance had led the evaluation, Kieran Thorne and Jace Merritt had managed the team beneath her.
The three of them had been the ones to look at the pitch when it came through LIE Studios' script evaluation pipeline, had looked at each other across a conference table, and had agreed, not without some private uncertainty, that this was the one to pass up to Regal.
Now months later, that decision looked different than it had in July. It looked like the kind of thing you didn't fully understand you were doing until you could see the whole shape of it.
Rowan Atkinson was in a car somewhere, heading toward the wrap party, taking calls he was only half present for.
Chris Columbus had gone quiet on social media three days ago. He did this sometimes, when something was ending, as he needed a few days to just; be inside it.
Before the interviews, retrospective pieces and the industry moved on to whatever was next.
He was proud of these twenty-four episodes in a way that was different from the pride he carried for his [Harry Potter] films.
They were all taking it well.
And then Kieran found the post.
….
It had been published on a small personal blog, not a publication platform with any real reach - just a page that belonged to a twenty-three-year-old woman named Maya who wrote occasionally and without expectation of audience.
Her last post before this one had been about a book she'd read in September.
It had four views, two of which were probably her own.
She was deaf and had been her entire life.
…and this is what she wrote.
===
I have been trying to write this since the first episode aired in March and I couldn't figure out how.
I still don't know if I've figured out how, but tonight is the last episode so I have to try.
I almost didn't watch it then either.
Someone shared a clip on my timeline, just a man sitting in a church pew looking increasingly uncomfortable, and without the sound I couldn't tell what was supposed to be funny about it.
But something about his face made me keep watching.
So I found the show.
I turned it on with subtitles, same as always; It's automatic for me.
Just what you do.
And then about forty seconds in, I realized I hadn't looked at the subtitles once.
The show opens with him at an exam.
He's late, sits down and you can see; immediately, just from watching him look at the paper, that he has studied entirely the wrong subject.
No one explains it with a dialogue, you just watch his face and you understand everything in about two seconds.
I don't know how to explain what that's like if you've never had to think about it.
When I watch anything, there's always a part of my brain running a separate process.
Reading the subtitles, matching them to faces, figuring out who said what, making sure I don't fall behind.
I do it automatically, as I have done it my whole life.
I didn't know I was doing it until March, when I suddenly wasn't.
For that whole first episode I just - watched.
The same way I've always assumed everyone else watches things.
There's a scene at a beach where he has to change into his swimming trunks without anyone seeing.
It goes wrong in about eleven different ways, and I was laughing before I had processed that something funny was happening.
…and when I say I laughed, it wasn't the usual polite kind, not the kind that comes from recognizing where the humor is supposed to be.
I think that's when I started crying.
I am not sure exactly when.
It arrived without announcement, and I noticed it when the beach scene ended and I went to take a breath and something caught in my chest.
I want to be clear that I am not writing this to be dramatic.
I have never felt sorry for myself about being deaf; it's just my life, and my life is fine.
I have people I love and things I care about.
I am not sitting in the dark feeling sorry for myself.
But I didn't know.
That's what I keep coming back to, even now, months later.
I didn't know what I was missing because I had never had it, and when you've never had something you can't feel the shape of its absence.
You assume the way you experience things is roughly equivalent to the way everyone else does.
Maybe a little different in a small percentage off.
I didn't know the percentage was that large.
For twenty-three years I have been watching films and television in translation, and I didn't know that's what I was doing.
I thought I was watching them.
I have watched every episode of this show since the day it came out.
Twenty-three of them.
Tonight will be twenty-four.
I watched every episode without subtitles, something I've never been able to say about anything else, and I laughed at each one, the same kind of laughter I hear from others in the room, something I'd spent most of my life unsure I could ever share the same way.
I know now.
Tonight is the last episode and I don't really know what to do about that.
It sounds like too much to say that a television show changed something for me.
But twenty-three episodes ago something changed, and I don't have another word for it.
I don't know who made this show or why they made it this way.
I don't know if they thought about people like me, and most probably not, it just worked out this way.
But I wanted to say it somewhere, even if nobody reads this, even if it just sits here.
Thank you.
For twenty-four weeks of watching something the same way everyone else did.
That's all.
– Maya
====
The post had been up for four hours when someone with sixty thousand followers shared it.
By the time the finale aired, it had comments.
….
Comments (6,491)
….
jenniferholloway_writes: [I am a sign language interpreter, and I shared this with every deaf person I work with this morning. So far I received eleven messages back. I am not okay and I don't expect to be okay for a while.]
regulardudenobody: [i watch this show with the sound off sometimes just because. didn't think about WHY until right now]
tara.m.k: ["I thought I was watching them." I had to put my phone down after that sentence, and since then I have picked it up three times and put it down again.]
deafinitelyme: [@user48821 Because it's the most honest sentence anyone has written about this. That's why]
deafinitelyme: [I am also deaf, 31 years, and I've watched every episode of this show and I didn't let myself think about this too hard because I knew if I did I'd end up writing exactly this. You wrote it better than I would have. Thank you for writing it]
filmschoolkid2003: [I am in film school and this is the most compelling argument for visual-first storytelling I have ever read. And it's not even an argument. She's just describing her Tuesday nights for the past nine months]
anonymous: [I watch this with my grandmother who has dementia and can't follow dialogue anymore. It's the only show we can still watch together and she laughs every single time. I understood that this show was special. I didn't understand it quite like this until now]
marcusbell.writes: [I am at work, and I just cried in the break room. I told my coworker I got something in my eye, obviously she didn't believe me, and I don't care]
sunflower.hana: [Maya you probably won't see this but this post is going to mean something to a lot of people for a very long time. I hope you know that]
…..
ChrisColumbusFilm(verified): [I read this three times, and I am going to be honest; we didn't think about it this way when we were making it. We were just trying to make something true. I am glad it found you and even more glad you wrote this]
…..
nothingtoaddreally: [I came here from a retweet and I don't have anything to add. I just read the whole thing and I will be thinking about it for a while]
…..
cc.artworks: [She says she doubts they thought about people like her, and then the director shows up in the comments and says they didn't. And somehow that makes it more, not less]
anonymoususer_77: ["Twenty-four weeks of watching something the same way everyone else did". That's it, that's the one that got me.]
deafinitelyme: [@anonymoususer_77 Yeah]
….
Elara read it first then she forwarded it to Kieran without a message, just the link.
Kieran sent it to the group, and nobody said anything for a long time.
Rowan Atkinson read it in the back of a car on the way to the wrap party.
He read it twice or even more times…
Then he put his phone away and looked out the window at the city moving past and didn't speak for the rest of the ride.
Chris Columbus had already seen it, and he had found it before anyone sent it to him, which said something about where his head had been tonight.
He had made big films, that belonged to millions of people, that carried the weight of beloved material, that required him to be a general as much as a director.
He was proud of those films…
But he had come to this show to breathe, to make something small and precise and true in a room without the pressure of scale pressing down on every decision.
Just like [Homealone], but it seems unknowing he made something even more great…
He did not anticipate any of this, the oldest argument for physical comedy; older than film, television and almost every framework the industry used to evaluate itself… was that it belonged to everyone.
He had not understood, until tonight, that for some people that wasn't a theory about comedy.
It was the only door that opened.
He didn't say any of this to anyone at the wrap party.
He showed up, he was present, he meant it when he said he was proud of what they had made together.
But for several days afterward he was quieter than usual.
And when someone eventually asked him in an interview what he was most proud of about the show, he paused for a moment longer than the interviewer expected.
That it turned out to belong to people we didn't know we were making it for, he said finally.
That's the thing I keep coming back to.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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