First, before I start my Small Screen Diary for the day, I figured I would address the fact that you may start seeing a few other writers around here. I wanted to give other aspiring blind film critics the opportunity to write about film, television, or audio description, and since I have a platform, why not? This isn’t monetized. They’re not being paid. I’m not being paid. The struggle is real for all of us. But I do have a platform, and if I can use it to give some other blind writers an opportunity to get their voices out there, I’m happy to do that. So if you start seeing some other voices popping up around here, that would be why.

The first show I knocked off was The Audacity, Season 1, Episode 8, which has audio description on AMC+ and is also currently on Netflix. This was the season finale for me, and honestly, the show grew on me. I’m kind of looking forward to a second season, even if there was a somewhat depressing ending to the first with a certain character exiting the show. I’m still not 100% sure Billy Magnussen is the draw for me here. I think it’s the ensemble around him, which is a little problematic when the lead of your show isn’t necessarily the reason you’re watching it, since he’s the character most likely to continue through future seasons. For example, I’m really enjoying Zach Galifianakis here, but he’s not billed like a regular. He feels more like a guest star or recurring player, and I think losing Galifianakis would be detrimental to the show’s future based on how much he already contributes. The audio description is just okay. I’m not going to tell you it’s amazing, but I’ve certainly heard worse, and it did what it needed to do in Episode 8, especially regarding a certain item placed in a trophy case, which was one of the stronger visual choices the episode needed to communicate, as well as the catching of the lanyard hanging from the tree near the end.

After that, I followed it up with Ghosts, Season 5, Episode 15, on Paramount+ with audio description by the Media Access Group. This was predictably as great as I thought it would be, although I’m starting to wonder if the show is setting up some kind of financial downfall for our humans. In this episode, Jay has to pretend to be Michael Jackson. No, not that Michael Jackson, but the Michael Jackson that Trevor created in order to pretend he had a job, and things do not go quite as well as planned. I love the fact that, of all the shows it has taken me forever to get through, one of them is Ghosts, which isn’t officially returning until midseason, although we’re supposed to get a Halloween special in October. Hopefully I’ll be caught up by then, because apparently my inability to stay current has finally accidentally worked in my favor.

Next up was another episode of The Legend of Vox Machina on Prime Video, which I believe puts me at Season 4, Episode 5. The fact that I’m watching this and Golden Axe simultaneously really gives me something to compare, because the shows occupy similar territory, and I still like The Legend of Vox Machina more than The Mighty Nein. I think that’s going to be a problem moving forward for its spiritual spinoff, because Vox Machina set that bar pretty damn high. The audio description here has been reliably great for four seasons, and knowing they’ve only got one more season left makes me hope they get to go out with a bang. This is one of those shows where the audio description has established such a consistent rhythm that I almost take for granted how much work it’s doing until I compare it with something that doesn’t work nearly as well.

I also started Last Seen, the new Apple TV series, so this was Season 1, Episode 1, dealing with a missing-person case in Australia. I don’t want to reveal too much because it’s one of those twisty thrillers, but this moved up my list after I noticed Stephen King recommending it, which made me wonder whether it might lean a little harder into horror or something creepy. So far, it appears to be a fairly standard missing-person thriller. I will say that the Pixelogic audio description here was not great. It was too flat, and the track wasn’t mixed well enough. It felt buried underneath the show, and I struggled to hear the description through much of the first episode, making this easily my least favorite audio-description experience of the day. There’s also a little bit of a struggle for those of us with thoroughly American ears trying to catch everything when both the dialogue and description have Australian accents. That’s not an argument that the description shouldn’t be Australian. It’s an argument for getting the balance right. I recently watched the Australian film Leviticus, which I haven’t reviewed yet but will once we hit spooky season, and its Australian audio description was much easier for me to hear. Here, I felt like the show itself was defeating the description. Not that this is going to cost Pixelogic a single ounce of work from Apple, since they seem to have that relationship locked down, but the mix needs work.

I also jumped into the second episode of Dancing with the Stars, the second part of the season premiere featuring the women. When I started watching this season, part of the experiment was simply to see whether audio description would ever appear and, if so, how long it would take. We’re coming up on Week 3 on Tuesday, and this episode, 12 days after it originally aired, still has no audio description. The reason I’m tracking this is that I attempted Dancing with the Stars in the past, and when Disney+ accidentally dumped me into an older season, I noticed that season had audio description. So at some point ABC was describing Dancing with the Stars. The question is what happened to it. Did they stop altogether? Is the description being produced but taking forever to make its way to Disney+? So far I’ve established that there’s at least a 12-day gap for this episode. We’ll find out when I eventually reach the third episode whether anything shows up after an even longer wait. If Dancing with the Stars actually had consistent audio description, I probably would watch the whole season, at least until everyone I was rooting for got eliminated. Right now, I’d like to see Julia Stiles win, if only for the possibility that she could eventually go to Andy Cohen and make him eat his words.

Lastly, I started Line of Fire, the new NBC drama with audio description on Peacock. This is the Peter Krause and Hope Davis show that is basically Blue Bloods if Blue Bloods had been smart enough to start in Washington, D.C. to begin with. The premise is maximized by having this family working throughout different parts of the federal government, with family members connected to the Secret Service, Department of Justice and U.S. Marshals, and the potential is obviously there to keep expanding into the FBI, CIA, NSA or whatever else they need in order to make it feel like this family has tentacles reaching throughout Washington. The second episode airs tonight, and because the pilot contains a rather large spoiler and plot twist, I would recommend watching the first episode before somebody ruins it for you if the show interests you at all. If you don’t know the twist already, it really does come out of left field. They planted a breadcrumb that I brushed off without really paying attention to it, so they can at least say they warned me. I’m not 100% convinced the twist works, but I’m waiting to see how they explain it. That ultimately may determine whether Line of Fire remains worth watching. In pilot form, though, it’s nothing if not interesting.

So who wins today? Who had the best audio description? I think I’m giving it to Line of Fire, although it’s a tough call because both The Legend of Vox Machina and Ghosts make strong cases on a somewhat weak day overall. Line of Fire gets the edge because there are some interesting moments involving an unseen figure, little origami cranes, people stepping out of the shadows, and other details where exactly how something is visually staged makes a difference. Vox Machina and Ghosts are both doing what they reliably do every episode, and they do it very well. Line of Fire is new, so some of those choices still feel fresh. Maybe five episodes from now I’ll be used to its tricks too, but for today, I’ll tip my hat to Line of Fire for having above-average audio description that genuinely helped sell the pilot.

At the bottom, I feel like 12 days is long enough for ABC to get audio description for Dancing with the Stars onto its own streaming service. I don’t think we’re asking for a lot here. So even though Last Seen desperately needs to balance its audio-description track better, the loser has to be Dancing with the Stars simply because there’s nothing there. I recently read a comment from an audio describer working on Big Brother in Canada who pointed out that the U.S. version receives live audio description when it airs there, while CBS itself doesn’t describe Big Brother in the United States. That’s kind of crazy. These are legacy franchises that have been running for decades and have made these networks enormous amounts of money. There’s no reason shows like Dancing with the Stars, Big Brother and American Idol should still be inaccessible to blind viewers. And because I have personally heard audio description on an older season of Dancing with the Stars, I know they’ve done it before. The fact that it existed and apparently doesn’t now concerns me more than if they had never tried at all.

That concern becomes bigger when I look at what Disney has been doing elsewhere. Recent Disney originals like Camp Rock 3 and Descendants: Wicked Wonderland have arrived without audio description, while we’ve also seen human audio description replaced on titles like Deli Boys and X-Men ‘97. I’ve also noticed quite a few shows across Disney+ and Hulu where you can listen all the way through the credits and never hear who actually created or performed the audio description, and the lack of credits bothers me too. I will always remember Disney once having the corporate slogan “Drawing creativity from diversity.” ABC is part of Disney, and accessibility should be part of that diversity. Lately, it feels like they’re moving in the opposite direction, and I really hope that isn’t where we’re headed.