CEO STORIES: Joe Strechay, Producer, Apple TV+ See

STRUGGLE FOR SERVICES

After having lost most of his sight during college, Strechay struggled to get the services and training he needed to help navigate day-to-day life. He attributes it to various factors: less awareness around the needs of someone who had grown up seeing but became blind at a young age; understaffing at agencies; and a lack of overall support from doctors and educators.

REPRESENTATION

A lifelong passion for film and television caused him to pay attention to how minorities and different populations – people of color, LGBTQI, the disabled – were represented. While working at an organization that advised around services for the blind, he wrote about the portrayal of blindness in TV and film as a hobby. Eventually media companies started requesting help related to casting, accessibility, and portraying the blind. His big showbiz break occurred with a consulting job for Marvel’s Daredevil for Netflix. Other jobs followed, ultimately leading to his producer job on See.

INCLUSION

Representation is the pathway to inclusion, Strechay emphasizes. Too often, minorities of all kinds are portrayed either as downtrodden or as people with some extraordinary authority, power, or other advantage. Once people start seeing minorities in a more accurate light in the reel world, they can better envision them in the real world, which translates into both hiring diverse workforces and being better able to serve the needs of any and all minority populations.