Neurodivergent TV characters used to be rare. Now they take the lead

Sydney Morning Herald

4 days ago

Patience Evans (Ella Maisy Purvis) is a young English woman who works in relatively untroubled isolation in the criminal records department of police headquarters in York. A wiz with data, she loves puzzles and finds it easier to relate to animals than to people. Shrinking from physical contact, she habitually moves around town in headphones as she finds all sorts of sounds – traffic noise, conversations – unsettling. At home and at work, she cocoons herself in distinctive environments fashioned to suit her needs.
Austin Hogan (Michael Theo) is a young Australian man who's worked as a forklift driver and loves trains – although he prefers to call them railways. He studies national flags, favours deerstalker hats and folds origami cranes when he's stressed. He discovered a London-based branch of his family when author Julian Hartswood (Ben Miller) was identified as his biological father.
Patience and Austin are the title characters in a couple of very different series. But the British crime thriller Patience (ABC) and the Australian-English sitcom Austin (ABC) share a common feature, and it's increasingly evident on TV: the eponymous characters and the actors playing them are autistic.
That's a notable shift: in decades past, neurodivergent characters were more likely to be marginal diversions, maybe seen as odd or labelled as crazy or eccentric, perhaps used as light relief.
Another quality Patience and Austin share – also increasingly evident – is that, in both productions, the protagonists' neurodivergence is depicted more as an attribute than an affliction. In Patience, which is adapted from the French series Astrid et Raphaelle (not available here), her ability to process volumes of information and to identify patterns that others miss bring her to the attention of Detective Inspector Beatrice Metcalf (Laura Fraser).
Austin, having discovered his connection with Julian in the 2024 debut season of the comedy, has been welcomed into the Hartswood family. His earnest, unflinchingly honest nature proves a disarming foil for Julian who might – or might not – be his dad, a connection that the first episode of the new season throws into doubt. Julian can be sly and opportunistic, inclined to skate around the morality of a situation when some benefit to him is involved – the kind of behaviour that Austin wouldn't contemplate.
Patience and Austin approach things differently from the neurotypical types around them, and both shows identify the ways in which this can be an asset. However, Patience, being a drama, spends more time dealing with the challenging side of the condition – such as self-doubt, anxiety and isolation – while the comedy portrays Austin as more of a blithe spirit sometimes challenged by circumstances.
Over recent years, increasing numbers of neurodivergent characters have appeared on-screen, particularly in crime series. Sometimes their conditions are specifically identified, sometimes their behaviour only suggests that they're on the spectrum. That's the case with Saga Noren (Sofia Helin) in the Swedish-Danish thriller The Bridge (Stan). She's a gifted detective who doesn't work well with others: she's brusque without intending to be impolite; she misreads social signals; she doesn't understand humour. She also absorbs information, whether she's playing poker or surveying a crime scene, differently from those around her.
Along comparable lines, in the mystery comedy-drama Monk (Foxtel), Tony Shalhoub plays a private detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder who's also plagued by myriad phobias. Once, he was a San Francisco policeman, but his mental-health spiralled after the murder of his wife, and he works for the department as a consultant.
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In style and tone, Monk was something of a precursor to High Potential (Disney+), which has been adapted from the French-Belgian series, HPI (Acorn, AMC). In it, Kaitlin Olson stars as a single mum and night-time cleaner of homicide-division offices who scans the whiteboard, sifts through rubbish bins and solves cases that confound the daytime detectives. With her dangly earrings, micro-skirts and lollipops, Morgan doesn't immediately generate confidence from other cops: some of them are predictably sceptical until her talent shines. But the beleaguered head of the squad recognises Morgan's, well, high potential, and engages her as a consultant.
Beyond the lead characters in a range of productions, neurodivergent characters are also more frequently appearing as members of ensembles, such as Quinni (Chloe Hayden) in Heartbreak High (Netflix) and Rose (Leah Byrne) in Dept. Q (Netflix).
Neurodivergent protagonists often have a champion, a steadfast supporter, friend, parent or mentor who recognises their gifts and learns to understand their differences. In part, that's the role of Detective Bea in Patience, as it is of protective father figure Dr Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff) in The Good Doctor (Amazon Prime, Stan, Netflix, 7Plus). Adapted from the Korean series Good Doctor (Netflix), it stars Freddie Highmore as Shaun Murphy, a surgical resident at a California hospital who is autistic and has savant syndrome.
As Austin and this hospital drama indicate, the presence of neurodivergent protagonists isn't confined to crime shows. For example, there's the Korean comedy-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Netflix), in which rookie lawyer Woo Young-woo (Park Eun-bin), who has Asperger's syndrome, brings her skills to legal battles. Woo is wide-eyed and sweet-natured, with a special interest in whales and dolphins, her understanding of human behaviour often stemming from her observations of marine animals.
It's a trait she shares with Sam Gardener (Keir Gilchrist), who's fascinated by penguins in Atypical. Robia Rashid's beautifully calibrated comedy-drama (Netflix) has autistic teenager Sam negotiating the complications of family life as he's navigating the minefield of adolescence and high school. Robia's series is funny, touching and illuminating as it examines the challenges for Sam and his family.
It's as though TV fictions have evolved to a stage where a recognition of neurodiversity, and inclusion of it, is now desirable in the creation of communities.
That said, Highmore offered a useful insight when I interviewed him soon after the globally successful premiere season of The Good Doctor. Commenting on the thinking behind the series, he said the show's producers were determined that Shaun should not be seen as representative of everyone who is autistic. As he put it, 'It's the same as if you had a neurotypical lead character in a television show: they would never possibly represent everyone who's neurotypical, and no one would expect them to.'