The Honest To Blog World Of Special Creator Ryan O'Connell

“I didn’t really like being a blogger,” Ryan O’Connell says. Right after spending his early career writing confessional essays for The world wide web, he discovered blogging did not, in so several words, make him feel lit indoors. “It felt sort of like a means to an end. My angle was habitually to be a television writer.”


That doesn’t mean he didn’t put in the time. Powered by being “young, starved, and having a ton of feelings,” O’Connell wrote — a lot. Enough for at least four memoirs, by his accounting. Although, to him, the finish line for this ambition was still television.


On April 12, Netflix released the opening season of Special, based off of O’Connell’s 2015 book, I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves. He served because the creator, writer, and eventually the star of the series, which sees a fictionalized Ryan (last name, Hayes) land an internship at a digital content farm called EggWoke that asks him to spill his guts for the complete Internet to devour.


IRL, O’Connell worked at sites like Vice and Thought Catalog before eventually selling his book, and later, optioning it for TV. [Editor’s note: I also worked at Thought Catalog, though not at the same time as O’Connell.] However 2015 was four years ago; in that time, he worked on the Will and Grace reboot, and used weekends to develop Special’s script by himself. (Producers and directors offered feedback and helped shape Special to its final form.) He right now calls that process “kind of a weird, isolating experience. … Hopefully, if we get a next season, then we can do a writer’s room and all that stuff,” he adds with a laugh.


Still, that allowed for a certain quantity of creative freedom. “I think I was so not convinced that this would ever be made that I wrote the scripts exactly how I wanted to write them,” he says right now. “I really, really thought they would never visualize the light of day. I just knew what story I wanted to tell, and I was like, well, whichever, this won’t get made or if it does it will air at a Arby’s and that will be that. That allowed me to be as trustworthy as I wanted to be without freaking out.”


Special’s first season is told over the course of eight episodes that run for an average of 15 minutes each. We meet Ryan before his internship, once he’s navigating a residence life with his helicopter mother and cracking self-deprecating jokes about his Grindr profile while at physical therapy for his cerebral palsy. The show doesn’t shy away from his disability, either; the opening scene features Ryan explaining CP to a random kid who has just witnessed him falling on the sidewalk. (O’Connell also has CP, making him one of the few actors whose lived experience as a disabled person actually resembles that of his characters.)


That Special is a comedy lends itself to one of its overarching themes: Ryan may be grappling with a certain level of internalized ableism, which partly accounts for the collection of jokes he makes about his own disability. (The other part is that good, ol’ fashioned personality trait called sarcasm.) And any time his new EggWoke coworkers mistake his having been struck by a vehicle because the cause for his disability, he does not correct them for the better segment of the complete first season. Though no one with a disability is obligated to share their experiences with anyone, O'Connell chose to frame Ryan's decision as a lie by omission; the experience was inspired by a similar one he had while he moved to New York as a budding writer.


It was key to O’Connell that all of his characters — from Ryan, to his mother (Jessica Hecht), to his blunt-to-the-point-of-rude boss, Olivia (Marla Mindelle) — be multi-faceted. “That is how I am, and why each person else is: we can be kind and virtuous, however we can also be selfish and self-serving, and mention the incorrect thing,” he says. “That’s just called being a human being. So why wouldn’t you paint a disabled person with the same brush? We’re not just here to be stimulating and make you go ‘Aww.’”


O’Connell points to a lack of awareness and also a general erasure of people with disabilities as one way our society has failed the nearly 26 percent of American adults who have some form of disability. “If we’re being highlighted, it’s generally because we’re being infantilized or treated with kind gloves,” he says, adding that a constant need to feel like “inspiration porn” can wear away at a person emotionally. “The idea that we routinely need to be virtuous and thus strong, and we need to be climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro without limbs is really unrealistic and one-dimensional,” he adds. Soon considering that, people who don’t have disabilities are rarely that strong and hardly ever that virtuous themselves.


To that end, it was also essential to O’Connell that the on-screen Ryan’s dating life didn’t hold back. “I really wanted to make construct a gay, disabled character that has sexual desire and wants and needs,” he says. “I feel like once disabled folks are portrayed in TV and film, it’s often like they’re Ken or Barbie dolls. And I really wanted to give this character some organization. I wanted him to just be horny. And I really wanted to show gay sex for what it is, and be really sincere about that representation.”


This does happen in an episode wherein Ryan has sex for the opening time, with a sex worker whom he’s hired. Some viewers have lamented how little time the show spent grappling with Ryan’s emotional arc in relation to that decision, and if the show does get renewed for a second season, O’Connell hopes he’ll have more time to work with.


“I come from the land of half-hour, where you’re just given more time,” he points out. “Initially, I felt so uncomfortable with 15 minutes yet it actually whipped my writing into shape because it had to be so lean and tight.” Still, he would prefer have the ability to spend more time with Ryan’s interiority, and with the inner lives of characters like Kim (Punam Patel), a EggWoke colleague who befriends Ryan as he learns how to climb the website’s viral charts.


That was a skill O’Connell knew how to channel instantly. “I feel like I write very universal things. Any time Once I worked at Thought Catalog, I would have called them pop songs, avocado toast, you know? I really was just boiling down human wants and needs to the simplest form, and people would relate to them,” he explains, though he concedes that having someone like Kim around, who could have helped him navigate how much of himself to share with the world, would have been accommodating. “I didn’t have anyone looking out for me any time Whenever I was doing it. Obviously,” he remembers. “How the fuck do you develop boundaries at age 20? A lot of what you do is trial and error.”


That process is true for any 20-year-old, whether or not they’re baring their soul for start up websites, and across an assortment of identities and experiences. (To those people, O’Connell cautions against doing so at a EggWoke-style site, given that everything on The world wide web is, in some way, permanent and can come back to haunt you. He jokingly suggests Tumblr as an alternative.)


He also hopes that Special and shows like it signify a shift in how viewers engage with stories that don’t necessarily resemble their lived experiences, and learn something about themselves in the process. “The show is going to be relatable to gay people and disabled people, yet people who aren’t gay or disabled can also visualize themselves in the material,” he adds, pointing to how marginalized people who did not visualize themselves represented on screen would still relate to a majority white, straight, cisgender, non-disabled experience. “We habitually noticed ways to relate to characters that didn’t look or sound like us. And the idea that you could only connect with people that are like you is sort of silly.”


It’s that core truth that connects Ryan with his EggWoke readers, just as it did with O’Connell and the people who read his essays all those years back. And while TV and movies have eventually given rise to inclusive storytelling out of more than simply lip service, it’s arguable that the shift began thanks to social media and confessional websites; people who'd things to mention however never felt heard suddenly they had a crowd. Because you can write listicles about what it felt like to be a very logged-on, insecure 20-something, and people would understand — that was their lived experience, too.


“Human experience has a lot of universal threads,” O’Connell says. “And I really wanted to show that with Special. Ryan’s struggles are your struggles. This character is just a classic underdog, and he struggles with feeling like he’s enough, which is a very universal feeling. There really are things that are unique to my life, yet this character is just like anyone else in terms what sort of life he wants to have.”


And what does a horny, multi-dimensional writer want out out his human experience? The response won't surprise you: "He wants to be happy."