Frank, D., Falvey, J., Garfinkle, D. & Renfroe, J. (Producers). (2006). Miracle Workers [Television series]. Los Angeles: American Broadcasting Company.

Premiered on March 6, 2006; Mondays at 10 EST/9 CST.

Reviewed by Alana Kumbier, The Ohio State University

The premise of ABC-TV's reality show, Miracle Workers, is straightforward and predictable: Each episode follows a pair of individuals living with serious medical conditions as they undergo medical treatments designed to "cure" their disorders. The show promises that its "patients' lives will be transformed before viewers' eyes as the professionals employ cutting-edge medical technology to heal those who need it most." It would not be out of line to imagine that, to qualify as "needy," the show's subjects must comply with its sentimental protocols: These subjects are expected to engage the sympathies of viewers as they perform illness and disabilities in ways that reinforce (ableist) cultural assumptions about the experience of living with a disability or a serious medical condition (e.g., that life with a disability or serious medical condition can never be "whole," or "full," and that—in some cases—it may not be a life worth living).

Even when the show's subjects benefit from the "cutting edge" medical technologies employed on their behalf, Miracle Workers fulfills its critics' worst expectations. As its description makes evident, the show hinges upon the delivery of otherwise-unobtainable medical care to people who can't access such care, usually for reasons of economic hardship, or simply due to the phenomenal cost involved in the interventions and after-care. The innovative medical technologies featured on the show are rendered particularly valuable—to both the show's subjects and its audience—by their very inaccessibility. While Miracle Workers asks us to marvel at the wonders of modern medicine, it does not demand that we interrogate the conditions that inform its practice. As it delivers health care in the form of a charitable gift, Miracle Workers figures its subjects as objects of pity. Even as the show narrates its subjects' extended struggles with chronic health conditions, the point of this representation is to foreground the "miraculous" nature of the show's intervention. Though it draws our attention to these concerns to create compelling narrative arcs, the show refuses to address the very (social, cultural, and economic) conditions which disable its subjects, whose needs are recognized as worthy of consideration only after they've reached the point of acute and debilitating pain.

As it operates within a logic of charity, Miracle Workers represents its subjects as needing and desiring medical intervention for reasons that exceed immediate suffering and economic hardship. The show reinforces the belief that impairments prevent people with disabilities from living full lives at a profound level. In the show's first episode, we watch as Todd Heritage, a father of three children who has been blind since childhood, receives corneal transplants that improve his sight. The show frames Todd's adult life in terms of his blindness: even though he is a husband who holds down a full-time job as a nurse's assistant, Todd—along with his family, the "Miracle Workers," and many audience members—understands his visual impairment as a lack that renders these relationships, and Heritage's life, incomplete before the "cure." The show suggests that, if Todd could see his wife, he would be able to love her even more than he already does. Without access to the visual, we (along with Todd) imagine his relationships as inferior: They are impaired by his inability to see.

In addition to reiterating dominant beliefs about disabled peoples' inability to live "full" lives, Miracle Workers employs rhetorical maneuvers and metaphoric tropes that are all too familiar. When Vanessa Slaughter, a woman living with chronic pain due to a degenerative bone and joint disease, appears in the show's first episode, she is identified as "wheelchair bound." A review of the show on Variety.com lifts this phrase directly from the show, as its author uses the term to describe Slaughter's condition (Lowry, 2006). While a review in The New York Times doesn't directly repeat this phrase, its author represents the wheelchair as an ultimate location (rather than a vehicle of mobility): a place where Slaughter has "ended up" (Genzlinger, 2006). As Todd R. Ramlow astutely observes in his review of the show for PopMatters.com, the show's treatment of Adrian Keller (a toddler with Vater's Syndrome) plays upon the metaphoric potential of his operation's literal outcome, as surgeons offer Adrian "the chance to stand tall" (2006). Here, Miracle Workers equates standing and tall stature with full humanity, and in the process, offers a troubling rationale for a risky surgical intervention.

While watching Miracle Workers is often an exercise in frustration, the show functions well as an exemplar. It could, for instance, be included in a Disability Studies course on visual culture, and/or viewed in conjunction with Rosemarie Garland Thomson's "The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography." The rhetorics Thomson identifies are clearly legible in each episode of Miracle Workers, and the show provides viewers with the opportunity to bring her work into conversation with the depiction of disability and illness on reality TV.

References

ABC, Inc. (2006). About the Show. Retrieved April 10, 2006 from http://abc.go.com/primetime/miracleworkers/about.html.

Genzlinger, N. (March 6, 2006). A Network Plays Guardian Angel in the O.R. The New York Times. Retrieved April 10, 2006 from http://www.nytimes.com.

Lowry, B. (March 5, 2006). Miracle Workers. Variety.com. Retrieved April 10, 2006 from http://www.variety.com.

Ramlow, T. R. (March 20, 2006). The Disability 'Cure' Lottery. PopMatters.com. Retrieved April 10, 2006 from http://www.popmatters.com.

Thomson, R. G. (2002). The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography. In S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, & R. G. Thomson (Eds.), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (56-75). New York: The Modern Language Association of America.