When Orphan Black co-creator John Fawcett read Kat and Niko Troubetzkoy’s new The CW show Sight Unseen, his response gave the half-sisters, who were producers on his own Peabody-winning BBC America series, a jolt of confidence. “We showed him the pilot [script] and he said, ‘This is one of the best detective thrillers I’ve read in a while,” Kat recalls.
The show follows Vancouver homicide detective Tess Avery (Dolly Lewis), who, after experiencing sudden sight loss and becoming clinically blind, resigns from her position. Soon after, she meets Sunny (Agam Darshi), an agoraphobic volunteer on a visual assistance app who remotely provides Tess with visual description via a lapel camera, and the two begin to take up cases on their own.
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Kat says that similar to Orphan Black, which “started as a cop franchise in the first episode” and eventually “found an unusual, very visceral way of storytelling,” Sight Unseen also uses investigation narratives as a gateway into a bigger story about the relationships between people and technology, and also with each other.
“One of the most important scenes to me is when we put Tess in a situation with Sunny and have her go up into the brightest spot on the top of a roof,” says Kat. “We were really interested in the limitations of technology, of what Sunny could and couldn’t see — that you can see there’s a guy standing right there, but the moment something is an inch off the screen, [he’s] gone.”
A co-production with CTV that debuted in the U.S. on April 4, the series was inspired by two separate experiences of the co-showrunners, occurring decades apart. In her early 20s, a time “when you feel like you’re invincible,” Kat woke the morning after a party “with half my vision gone.”
“Without any warning, as a vain 20-something I was blind,” Kat recalls of her initial experience with retinal detachment. “I was bandaged and it took about three weeks for my vision to slowly return. I had to be guided by a family member. I just kept going, ‘But I can see,’ because I could see some light.’”
That experience — and the 20-some laser surgeries since — led her to think more about “seeing and our emphasis on what things look like.” It’s an interest that’s only grown as society has embraced near constant interaction with multiple screens. “We are just so obsessed with sight, and increasingly so,” she explains.
More recently, Niko heard a podcast episode featuring a woman with vision loss who described the experience of using a guide through apps like Be My Eyes, which connect blind and low vision people with sighted volunteers on-demand through live video chat.
“I was just so compelled by that relationship between those two people and called Kat,” she recalls. “We started talking about it and thought, what a fascinating relationship that would be, having to give up your agency in a way to somebody else. Also, how the guiding would play into technical elements of clue solving. It just felt like the perfect way to do something fresh in the investigative genre.”
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With Sight Unseen, the creative team had an opportunity to portray both the lived experiences of people with low vision and blindness, and also to play in the investigative genre itself. “Representation is not the only thing,” says story editor Graham Isador. “It’s about showing that these characters have nuance and also putting them in these worlds, so it’s an entertaining show.”
To do this, the series surrounds Tess with an ensemble that includes Sunny as well as Mia (Alice Christina-Corrigan), a blind woman who aims to support Tess in navigating the world as she now understands it; Matt (Jarod Joseph) a tech-savvy childhood friend who often (illegally) assists Tess with her investigations and Jake (Daniel Gillies), Tess’ former homicide partner who begrudgingly helps navigate her unsanctioned cases.
“The thing that drew us to the idea [of Sight Unseen] was the way it subverted suspense,” says Niko. “Having a moment of real suspense in broad daylight is something that you don’t traditionally see on a cop show and allows you to tell a story in new and exciting ways.”
“The technology is a whole other relationship,” Lewis adds. “She’s not sure if she loves or hates it, but she needs it and will continue to rely on it. That brought up for me a lot of interesting questions in terms of shaping one’s identity, establishing one’s boundaries. Those are all really murky things that as a society we’re trying to muddle our way through.”
As Tess and Sunny navigate solving crime around the Canadian city, Sight Unseen presents a diverse range of experiences with vision and access — on the job, in one’s community, at home.
“She’s just so fully formed. She’s not somebody that you just pity and she’s not a pure martyr. She doesn’t know what she’s doing a lot of the time, like the rest of us,” says Lewis of her character. “Sometimes she has the humility to accept she needs help, sometimes she’s too proud to even notice that she needs help. Her relationship with this change in her life, and how that’s changing her relationships with the people she knows, I don’t know if I’ve seen that explored quite so thoroughly.”
The show also serves as the rare occasion where two characters with disabilities, both women and one of color, are asked to explore what it means to navigate life with their own strengths, vulnerabilities and even secrets. “We loved the idea of Sunny being an unreliable narrator, an agoraphobic who doesn’t leave her house. It put them both in a situation where they each needed the other and for good reasons,” Kat says. “Together, they’re both better, but they also get each other in more trouble. It’s symbiotic.”
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In both Canada and the United States, an estimated 27 percent of people have a disability. Yet it’s still rare to find an openly disabled showrunner, multiple writers, consultants and actors on the same Hollywood production. Sight Unseen not only counts Kat and Lewis — both of whom have retinal detachment — as part of the diverse blind and low vision community shaping the series, but also Isador and fellow writer Ryan Knighton as well as consultant Yvonne Felix.
That means the show bucks the industry tradition of asking actors to be consultants for free and also of hiring disabled artists as consultants instead of as writers, with pay over 100 times less than WGA minimums. The traditional practice is a reactive way of seeking authenticity from people whose insights, contractually, don’t have to be heeded, undercutting both the work and pay of disabled creatives.
On set, Lewis’ perspective was in tandem with Kat’s. “We were able to talk about the character in a way that felt like I didn’t have to explain anything to her,” Lewis says. “She just got everything right off the bat so we could collaborate artistically in a way that felt very free.”
That was after Felix, a self-described true crime junkie and consultant who specializes in the intersection of arts, disability and technology, had already been hired. Having witnessed in a professional capacity how tech can be weaponized in medicine — “through the lens of fixing you and that you’re going to be ‘normal,’” Felix was positioned to help the team explore the nuances of society’s growing codependency on tech from a disability perspective.
Part of their expertise also came from personal experience with a device that gave them access to their remaining sight for about five years. “The technology didn’t provide me with who I was. It opened up a world to me that I just wasn’t aware of,” Felix, who identifies as partially sighted, says. “But my codependent relationship was with the ideal of being able-bodied, and what I found out at the end of the journey was that actually, I’m great without that device. I just utilized the tool to gain information to have a sense of equity.”
So when it came to their consultant work, Felix’s job was to help capture through accessibility “the dream” of working as someone who identifies as blind or with blindness and having your accommodation accepted. “A lot of our conversations were about whether technology actually helps people in their life, and how it helps. Can people buy into this experience?” they say. “When you see somebody [like Tess] who’s blind, the fact that she doesn’t always have a cane [in the show] is a real thing that people need to accept.”
For Isador, a former contributing editor at Vice with progressive vision loss as a result of keratoconus, working to punch up scripts and shape the series’ representation made the experience of creating the show feel more complete. “It was this combination of being able to be recognized as a person who has lived experience with this, so I can talk about it in a way that feels authentic,” he tells THR, “and also as a writer. Those two things were valued equally in the writers room.”
Isador, who came to the showrunners’ attention through an op-ed about his experiences with low vision in corporate copy editing, points to times he and Knighton were able to pepper into episodes (sometimes comically) insensitive interactions with sighted people as some of his favorite writing moments. “There’s all these little things, in addition to all the kick-ass big narrative moments that feel really fun and play within the genre,” he says.
Within that, it was important to “figure out how we weren’t just being tokenistic” in the approach to characters and stories, and to find the opportunities to explore the realities and diversity of people with sight loss. “People usually think of blindness as complete darkness,” he adds, “but for the majority of people who are dealing with this, it exists on the spectrum.”
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“Blindness covers a lot of different lived experiences, which are not about what your brain is doing with your eyes but about how you navigate the world,” Felix tells THR. “The reality is that you’re listening, you’re feeling. You are given an experience through rehabilitation that tells you how to navigate when essentially all sides [of society] are telling you you don’t belong in it.”
Conveying that dichotomy within Sight Unseen’s narrative required the series to provide more accommodations, from the audition process to communication in the writers’ room to navigating the set. But the adjustments to the production’s various processes, say its team, didn’t require a major overhaul of Hollywood’s traditional approaches to work.
To avoid Hollywood’s past narrative missteps and stereotypical portrayals, a months-long search to find Tess and other characters ensued. The casting team initially “used the standard industry approach of sending out a breakdown far and wide at first,” says casting director Jason Knight, “but realized right away” that to do their due diligence, a broader approach was necessary.
“Since our lead role was conceived as someone who becomes a part of the blind and low vision community in the first episode, it was paramount that we cast someone from that community,” Knight explains. “Once we made that commitment, we needed to stick to our guns and leave no stone unturned.”
Through the process, a new multi-pronged approach emerged, including reachouts to different disability groups to spread the word online. After working on See, Knight and the Sight Unseen casting team leaned on a database of blind or low vision talent built for the Apple TV+ series. A recent casting call for Disney’s Out Of My Mind, in which young adults with disabilities were scouted for many of the lead roles, was another resource.
During auditions, sides that were accessible for blind and low vision actors were created and Zoom was used “almost exclusively for callbacks and chemistry reads,” widening the talent pool and keeping costs down for both performers and the production. The casting team also made adjustments to the standard self tape audition submission format, even allowing some performers to audition via Zoom “right out of the gate to accommodate for different levels of accessibility,” says Knight.
“They wanted to check in all the time about my thoughts. How do I, on a technical level, think I can portray this experience in a way that’s authentic and respectful at the same time?” Lewis tells THR. “There’s a lot of ways that our bodies can move, but everybody has their own experience and you can’t really question that. At the same time, I want to represent a bigger community, so how do I find the middle?”
In the writers room, similar steps to support a more flexible and responsive environment were made. When reviewing scripts and offering feedback, Felix would listen to those scripts and send notes through voice memos. Meanwhile, Isador would provide his punch ups through Google Docs, which allows him to use his phone “and do the proper zoom-ins,” speeding up his work.
Like many writers rooms since the pandemic, the series used Zoom with scribes who were able to choose how and when they engaged their cameras. For Knighton, an experienced writer who identifies as blind and keeps everything in his head, Niko would repeat all the beats as they broke stories “so that he is hearing and thinking about them all,” she says. Substantial time was also dedicated to trying digital whiteboard apps like Writers Room Pro before realizing “none of them are really accessible at all,” adds Niko. “There’s basically nothing out there that works for screen readers, so we muddled through, and the coordinator would make sure to print off PDFs at the end of every day if we were structuring a story.”
“They were conscious of accessibility the entire time and we were treated as individuals being asked what do you need?” Isador says. “Those questions can seem very basic for a lot of people, but my experience working in different rooms is not that. This was just being able to say, ‘I need this in a Google Doc today,’ without having four meetings with somebody to explain why I need a Google Doc and a doctor’s note, and then explaining to multiple people the nuances of my vision loss.”
That receptiveness was replicated on set, where the production worked through a learning curve in order to support the series’ low vision and blind cast members. That included Lewis, who had not previously spent a lot of time on soundstages and, like many people with disabilities, was used to having to adapt to a world that is rarely accommodating.
“Working with people who are really focusing on this because they’re telling a story about it was a bit of a confrontation for me because they would point out things that could help me that I didn’t realize I could ask for. It highlighted for me how little I had been asking for, or perhaps how little I had allowed myself to really take stock of what my future is going to look like,” Lewis says.
During filming, Lewis would remind the crew she didn’t know where the camera was as it was painted all black. “They came up with a system of having the different lenses that they would put on the camera outlined in neon tape, so that I would always be able to know, ‘OK, there’s that hot pink square over there. That’s what I’m aiming for. That’s what I’m trying to stay away from,’” she recalls.
The soundstage wasn’t any more forgiving, with cords, heavy and hot equipment, and crew dressed head to toe in black, complicating navigation for the actress, who has recently lost her night vision. The adjustments, Lewis says, were quick. One day she showed up to a soundstage and the doors had all been fixed with neon tape, including various symbols to identify whether the door was for a bathroom or an exit. There were also arrows pointing in certain directions so she could make her way back to set.
“There would always be somebody waiting around — I never asked for that,” she adds. “But there was always somebody nearby, hanging out, in case I was coming back and didn’t know where we were. In case I needed them,” Lewis says. “I felt like they really supported me in the physics of how to be on a set. I think people don’t factor in how hard that can be.”
With accessibility measures in place, actors like Lewis and Christina-Corrigan were able to focus on their performances instead of having to troubleshoot their environment. “I have to credit Alice Christina-Corrigan. When we read the riders that came with her contract, a lot in the end turned out to be very simple things, like if we’re at a read-thru, she would prefer everyone has the large font so she isn’t singled out,” Kat says. “That really was a watershed for so many people. You realize how many people aren’t speaking up who have disabilities — sight unseen, as it were.”
“It was interesting how many other people on set told us that they found [the accessibility] stuff really helpful and useful, and that it wasn’t until they had it there in front of them that they realized what an impediment not having those things is to working every day,” adds Niko.
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“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, what you can do or what’s off limits to you because society hasn’t caught up yet,” says Lewis. “It’s all about relationships. It always comes back to that ability to jump off the cliff and trust in somebody.”
For Lewis, her experiences around the show — on and offscreen — have been an exercise in trust. But as Felix notes, “the idea that independence for someone who is blind means that you are alone in the world is a stereotype. It is a trope and a message that people from the community constantly get — that you should be able to do this by yourself. The reality is, as humans, we don’t do anything by ourselves.”
The show’s ability to juggle respecting one’s autonomy while reinforcing that we all live in and rely on community has meant Tess is shaped in a way that her sight loss isn’t always the most interesting thing about her. “It’s a huge transformation for her that I did not take lightly, but that’s not the only part of her story,” Lewis explains. “She’s still a woman. She’s a white person. She’s an older sister. She’s a cop. She has to pay her rent. She wants to have a fun date. She still might want to have a one night stand. Those can all be things others experience.”
For Kat, Niko, Isador and the other writers, it was important to bring that fullness to Tess’ character and journey, to move beyond Hollywood’s historical superhero versus victim dichotomy. “We never wanted to pull Tess back on physical actions,” Kat tells THR. “We didn’t want to take things away from her. We wanted her to be rash, headstrong, stubborn, not a people person. Then we put Sunny in her ear.”
But starting from a place of autonomy, agency and wholeness requires rejecting one-dimensionality — an uncommon approach to disability representation in Hollywood. Yet Sight Unseen has committed to it, in almost every aspect of the production process and beyond. Isador reveals the production launched a scholarship for Canadian journalists with sight loss and blindness.
“Nobody’s going to be perfect with these things and there’s always nuances with the conversation, but that support and the knowledge of that support is always at the forefront of what we’re trying to do,” says Isador. “We’re dealing with authenticity, but also putting our money where our mouth is.”
