The CW today is showing the American premiere of the drama series Sight Unseen. The series, which premiered on Canadian television earlier this year, chronicles the life of a former homicide detective who, while working a case, starts to lose her vision and is forced to leave her post. Despite being diagnosed as clinically blind, the woman helps the police department solve crimes with the aid of her agoraphobic friend and sighted guide. The friend lives far away, so the woman uses technology to connect with her and, crucially, adapt to the world.
In a recent interview ahead of the launch, Sight Unseen co-creators and showrunners Karen and Nikolijne Troubetzkoy, who are half-sisters, explained the show’s origin story spools from a few different threads. Karen had what she described as a “major sight loss incident” in her early 20s after a night spent slam dancing and getting drunk led her to waking up the next morning being unable to see. After seeing an ophthalmologist, she was rushed to the hospital and into surgery on both eyes. Both her retinas are “very thin” and has degeneration, including a “whole tumbleweed” of cascading effects such as cataracts and scar tissue. For several weeks, Karen was led by sighted guide, the term for a sighted person leading a Blind or low vision person while they hold onto an elbow, while telling everyone she still could see light and shadows.
“I didn’t know about low vision [before the injury] and the many kinds of sight loss and all the individual experiences,” Karen said of her ignorance around vision. “I’ve always been fascinated by the divide between sight and low vision—more so in our period where people seem obsessed with appearances and Instagram and all things visual.”
For her sister’s part, Nikolijne told me she was listening to a podcast about a Blind woman who used a guide to help her navigate the world around her. The guide helped the woman do things like get dressed, find her apartment, and get in and out of Ubers. Nikolijne was struck by the interplay of the women, saying she and Karen began talking about creating characters inspired by this “fascinating relationship.”
“What we found [about the interpersonal relationship] was it was about trust and about control,” Karen said. “It was about a whole new perspective on life and the psychological underpinnings of that, which led naturally to a thrilling and entertaining visual spectacle for sighted viewers [while having] this interesting built-in narrative of the guide.”
The protagonist in Sight Unseen, Tess Avery, is played by Dolly Lewis in what’s her first real credit. Lewis became intrigued by the show when a script landed on her desk one day and her being struck by how “really unique” it was and her interest was piqued. A large part of said interest stems from her own coping with vision loss; she described herself as “always having terrible vision” and her retinas began to detach in her 20s. The progression, she said, has been slow so her day-to-day life hasn’t been affected very much to this point. An exception is the onset of severe night blindness, which precludes her from driving after dark. Playing the role of Tess caused Lewis to confront her eyesight, of which she admitted to not thinking much about before accepting the role. Lewis thought it would be interesting to, perhaps prematurely, “get a taste of things” as someone with low vision considering her personal circumstance. Moreover, she was highly intrigued by the interpersonal relationships, telling me how changes in the body not only affects the person in question but how they reverberate to others in their orbit.
At a high level, Graham Isador, a writer and podcaster who works on Sight Unseen, praised the Troubetzkoy sisters’ work in creating a series that intelligently blends entertainment with authenticity with regards to the lived experiences of disabled people. Isador, who has vision loss himself, said Sight Unseen is but one more step for the disability community in media because “there’s not a lot of representation that goes on that way” and expressed gratitude for being able to contribute some of his own experience with vision loss from the writer’s room.
“We’re trying to make to make a kick-a** TV show that goes beyond talking about accessibility,” Isador said.
Isador went onto describe the historical precedent for disability inclusion on film and television, noting disabled people generally are sullied or pitied and made to be inspirational in how they overcome their own bodies. Disabled people, he added, are portrayed either as superheroes or hapless, neither of which he said is indicative of anyone’s lived experiences. For her part, Karen said everyone involved with production has strived to make everything as genuine and accessible as possible; she noted there’s “always another layer you could add to it” after hearing advice from consultants. Karen conceded everyone was “naive” about disability-related things when they first started, but have grown since and look forward to “exponentially expanding the opportunities” in the future, particularly if a second season is ordered.
“I don’t think there’s any question media is getting better,” Nikolijne said of disability in media. “I think there is improvement in the way that people with low vision are being portrayed on screen and the roles they’re given. But there’s so many different levels that we can continue to get better and improve in—like having actors who have lived experience of what they’re portraying on screen, [as well as] telling stories about various disabilities that are about the characters as humans, not about their disability, and creating stories that are also accessible to people in those communities when they are on screen or when people are listening to them. There’s multiple layers in which we can go and can continue to get better, and I think we’ll get there but progress is really slow.”
From an actor’s perspective, Lewis concurred things are getting better.
“We are seeing changes in how [disabled] people’s experiences are being represented for sure,” she said. “I always think it can go further. What I love so much about the experience of working on [Sight Unseen] was that Karen and Nikolijne set the tone. It was challenging… the story that they were asking me to tell wasn’t just this woman experiences a major loss in her sight and we’re just gonna watch her grapple with that. It was a woman experiences a major loss in her sight. She’s also has these relationships to navigate, [which are] totally unrelated to what the condition of her sight is; in other words, she’s still a person who has the challenges that everybody else has. In a lot of ways, she has a lot of other added challenges. It was such a whole story… it wasn’t the lazy route of ‘Let’s just watch her struggle with her sight’ or ‘Let’s just do a cookie-cutter approach.’ It was ‘Let’s watch a whole human being who has the same challenges as a lot of other people.’ That was a very grounding reminder that, whatever you’re experiencing, it’s never just one thing.”
When asked how network executives felt about the show, Karen and Nikolijne said The CW has been extremely supportive. Nikolijne told me the powers-that-be there have been “fully on board and very encouraging in terms of what we wanted to do from a creative perspective.”
As to what Sight Unseen is supposed to be to audiences, however important the representational aspect is, Karen emphasized the show essentially exists for people’s entertainment. It is Hollywood, after all.
“Most important is making [Sight Unseen] f****** fun,” Karen said.
Nikolijne added the vibe from press and others has been positive, with people in Canada being especially happy about Sight Unseen since its debut. In the United States, The CW has done a lot of advertising as well. For his part, Isador expressed optimism that disability will become normalized as part and parcel of a person’s humanity, alluding to Lewis’ comments about Tess’ condition being only a part of her existence.
Disabled people, like her character Tess, are multifaceted, Lewis said. They have the same basic problems and annoyances as anyone else. Sight Unseen, she added, does those notions justice in many ways.