Atypical, Episode 2: A Human Female
I didn’t think I would continue to watch Atypical, but it seems to be still in the consciousness of writers I follow. Generally, autistic people don’t like it, non-autistic people do. Not completely and uniformly, but there is this debate going on with few people actually listening to one another. I’ll attempt to articulate my thoughts better.
Episode 2 carries on from episode 1 with Sam crushing on his therapist, his mother, Elsa, both avoiding and being drawn to the barman, Casey balancing her future with her attraction to Hunky But Awkward Guy, and Sam’s father, Doug, being generally clueless and useless. Standard sitcom fare, really.
It struck me how little of “A Human Female” actually focuses on Sam. I may be mistaken, but of our four main characters I don’t think he even got a plurality of the screentime. Even then, the time he is the focus of the onscreen action is even smaller.
There are hints of a person there. At one point the show tries successfully to show that Sam is experiencing a sensory overload, and he has an outburst while talking to Doug, saying “I am all there!” and expressing his frustrations about how everyone else seems to find life easier than him. However, the show pivots away to prioritise Doug enjoying bonding with his son.
Sam still exists mainly to be Autistic and have other people react to that. I realise, yes, that autistic people have difficulty understanding idioms and social cues, but Sam’s behavior is ludicrous. He misunderstands every turn of phrase said to him. He behaves astonishingly rude and even outright breaks obvious laws, like breaking into a house because he can’t ring the doorbell. This strays far away from a light-hearted but honest portrayal and into a tone-deaf caricature. He acts less like being autistic and more like he lived alone in a cave his whole life.
Sam’s narration still revolves entirely around birds and Antarctica, as if autistic people have no other thoughts or feelings beyond their “obsessions”. Even his motivations in his main goals are thinly sketched. Why does he want a girlfriend? Is it he wants to be normal? Is it something else? There are hints there, yes, but again it’s all buried and vague like he is an opaque cypher instead of a full character with an inner life.
The other characters, stock that they are, are given nuance. Elsa both feels underappreciated but also wants more freedom in her life, torn between being a perfect mother and an attraction she knows is foolish but from which she can’t quite pull herself away. Casey is protective but also slightly resentful of her brother, she’s looking for an escape through rigorous training but she’s naturally rebellious. Sam, in comparison, just wants a girlfriend so he can be more normal. I think.
Additional observations:
— Julia, Sam’s therapist, is truly awful at her job. She does not appear to pay attention to anything Sam says and has a terrible grasp on professional boundaries. She blithely ignores Sam talking about her underwear and apparently indulges him by telling him fairly intimate details about her boyfriend.
— They can’t even keep Sam’s literalness consistent. He overhears Casey call a girl a skank, he asks if it’s because she’s promiscuous and Casey tells him no, that’s wrong and not to take her literally all the time. Later, he goes up to the girl and calls her a promiscuous skank. Similarly, Doug explicitly tells Sam he did not “steal” Elsa, but then Sam becomes obsessed with “stealing” Julia. So, is he over-literal, or does he just not listen to other people? I just don’t get what they are trying to do here.
