Podcast Preview: Ironside

Episode 31 of the Disability.TV Podcast will upload on Friday, March 25. I’m going to title the episode, “Chief Ironside: Peer Counselor.” It will focus on my favorite episode of Ironside, the remarkable late ‘60s, early ‘70s police drama featuring a main character who uses a wheelchair.

Join me as I revisit “Light At The End Of The Journey.” It’s one of the few Ironside episodes in which Chief Ironside’s disability is an important part of the story. It’s also an extremely rare example of a TV show in which two disabled people interact, and where a disabled person motivates another disabled person’s development.

In addition to exploring why I like this particular episode so much, I’ll try to talk through why I keep coming back to the Ironside series, which is so stylistically dated and in some ways insubstantial, at least compared with much of today’s “prestige TV.”

As always, the podcast will be full of spoilers, so if you have no idea what Ironside is, or if you don’t remember the episode, I suggest watching it free on Hulu.

For a preview of the things I’ll be talking about, you might want to read this blog post I wrote about a year ago:

“This chair is my white cane. Where’s yours?”
Andrew Pulrang, Disability Thinking - March 21, 2015

Ironside is also the first TV series I talked about on the Disability.TV Podcast. The episode is a bit long and the quality isn’t that great, but it explains a bit of my history with the show, and why I believe it still stands as one of the best depictions of disability on television.

Here’s the episode:
Disability.TV - Ep. 2, Ironside (Original)