Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ might find a little excessive two minutes before Armageddon. In this respect, then, Atypical is proving rather atypical.
The reason for the mixed reception is that its 18-year-old protagonist, Sam, has autism — and, as we know, in these righteous times fictional characters are judged not on whether they’re convincing individual creations but whether they’re virtuous enough as representatives of an entire group. Happily for the bloggers, by that all-important criterion, Atypical was bound to fall a little short. (One especially righteous soul has duly pointed out that Sam is a white heterosexual male, even though ‘in real life, women, queer people and people of colour can be autistic too’.)
Certainly, the show doesn’t avoid many of the familiar motifs surrounding autism — however true some of them might be. When not wearing noise-reduction headphones to cope with school (a school, incidentally, populated by possibly the oldest teenagers since Grease), Sam is a nerdy assistant in a tech store.
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