TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

comedy

New Hulu series, created by a woman with autism, lauded for avoiding stereotypes

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Nina and Evie, played by Ashley Storrie and Kat Ronney from a scene in Dinosaur

One of the hardest aspects of living with autism, according to Scottish comedian Ashley Storrie, is “masking”–trying to hide it from everyone else. You would think then that creating and starring in a television series partly based on her life would be terrifying. Instead she found it liberating.

“Being Nina has made me realize that I should just be me and spend less time trying to make everybody feel more comfortable around my weirdness,” says Storrie about the character she plays on Dinosaur.

The title refers to Nina’s infatuation with dinosaurs and her job as a paleontologist, which she loves. But the six-episode series also shows Nina’s struggles to deal with both small and large disruptions to her routines.  is propelled by a major disruption in Nina’s life as the sister she lives with gets engaged and prepares to move out. 

The website “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism” called the series “excellent” and declared it superior to the “stereotyped-laced” Netflix series Atypical about an autistic adolescent boy. Read an interview with Ashley Storrie on that site. 

Actors With Intellectual Disabilities Steal the Show in “Champions”

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Five actors with disabilities, including Down Syndrome, wearing basketball uniforms huddle in a scene from the film "Champions"

Never mind Woody Harrelson. The real standouts of the movie Champions, directed by Bobby Farrelly and adapted from a Spanish film by Mark Rizzo, are the actors who portray the Friends basketball team.

“As a writer, you hope that the actors like the material and that they elevate it in some way,” Rizzo said in a recent interview. “In this film, each and every member of the cast did exactly that. I was blown away by how the funny scenes were just funnier with them in them. They made brilliant choices that I could not have imagined.”

Woody Harrelson plays a tough minor-league coach whose dream of working in the NBA is derailed when he is court-mandated to work with a team of players with intellectual disabilities, the Friends.

Rizzo said his goal was to allow plenty of room for the young actors to make the creative choices necessary for bringing their characters to life.

“For me, it was making sure that the disabled people in the movie carried as much story and as much agency as the non-disabled people. That was really my sole focus. I wanted to give them as many choices and emotional arcs as any other character would have.” Read more.

TravelAbility Takeaway: Who doesn’t love a good underdog sports movie? Harrelson is convincing in the Tom Hanks “there’s-no-crying-in baseball-role”, but the movie is stolen by the team of actors with intellectual disabilities. They are at once funny and believable. Note: Both the original Spanish film and the American remake draw inspiration from the true story of the Aderes basketball team, a Valencia-based team of players with intellectual disabilities who who win multiple championships in Spain.

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