Are you an aspiring actor with diabetes? Do you have big dreams of bringing your blood sugar to the big screen? Read on! Erin Spineto has a project that you might be interested in. For more about how it all came to be, here’s Erin.
I was watching a CBS show the other night that had a diabetic character in it. The second it was mentioned, I got so excited.
It wasn’t because I finally was going to see my disease on screen. It gets screen time all the time.
I was excited because I could not wait to see how they screwed it up.
In this particular episode, the diabetic character was a dog. And a dumb dog at that.
He had wandered off and fallen down a fifteen-foot storm drain. When his owner finally finds him, the team of geniuses is already working on saving him. She informs them that the dog has diabetes. The stakes have just been raised.
Being the geniuses that they are, the first question they ask is when was his last insulin shot.
Twelve hours ago. And the music swells. The stakes have just been raised. The dog must be rescued in the next fifteen minutes or he will die.
Wait.
What?
Most likely the dog is running off a long-acting insulin, which means, even if it stopped working exactly twelve hours after injection–which it doesn’t– the poor dog’s blood sugar would slowly begin to climb after twelve hours.
It certainly wouldn’t pass out and die exactly at the twelve-hour mark. The dog could probably survive quite a few days without insulin. Sure, he’d feel pretty crappy, and maybe do a little long-term damage, but he’d recover once he got back on track with his shots.
One more example of how people who are looking for a cool plot twist grab for the diabetes card and throw in their misconceptions of what it means to have diabetes.
I have yet to see a character with diabetes who isn’t a day-player. Who has diabetes, but not because it will make a kidnapping even more dramatic, or being a multi-personality doctor have strange events in the operating room.
To have a group of people on screen who have lives and interests and desires and also diabetes, to see the different ways personalities interact with the management of diabetes, to have the jokes that we can all tell each other finally up on the screen would be incredible.
So instead of just complaining about how “they” just don’t get it or ever do it right, I decided to do better.
A Bad Case… is an original comedy series about four friends. It is not some PC, educational crap about fighting stereotypes and bringing a message of hope and happiness to the world. It is a dark comedy about when diabetes goes all wrong. It is purely for entertainment value and laughs and will be told in six episodes of five to seven minutes each.
I would love to have this series made by people with diabetes. There’s something about being in the trenches together that makes it ok to tell these kinds of jokes. We go through it. Our lives are shaken by it. We are the only ones who can really get away with making fun of ourselves.
If this sounds like something you would love to help make a reality, I am currently looking for a cast and a few select crew positions.
If you have ever wanted to be in front of the camera, or maybe behind it with a cast full of people with diabetes producing the reality of what life is like for us in a seriously funny way, I want to hear from you.
If you have that one friend who is hilarious and you have told them a million times they need to get into a show, I want to hear from you. And them.
If you have zero acting ability and no experience with a camera, but you can hold a pole above your head for a few hours while watching an amazing team put together something that has never been done before, drop me a line.
And if you have been working in Hollywood for years, but haven’t had the pleasure of playing someone with diabetes like you, (yeah, I’m talking to you Derek, Austin, and Jennifer) reach out.
And if your best trait is your ability to sit behind a screen and binge watch shows for hours while Tweeting and Snapchatting and Instagramming all your friends, we need you, too, to get the word out and to enjoy the show. Feel free to drop me a line and tell me you’re out there, too, waiting to see a version of yourself on your phone.
A project like this needs a community to make it happen and I tend to think we have one of the best communities out there. Here’s your chance to prove me right.
For more info on how to join the cast or crew and on the production details, go to SeaPeptide.com/ABadCase
Awesome – thank you, Erin!
