For goodness’ sake

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. His obsession with Antarctica means that his small talk features such things as the life cycle of the chinstrap penguin. He’s prone to blurting out — or solemnly expressing — whatever he’s thinking, no matter how tactless. Worse still, much of this is played for laughs, just because it’s funny.

Of course, the programme does try hard to be on the side of the angels. Despite its daring use of jokes, the tone is always kindly, with Sam (a terrific performance by Keir Gilchrist) coming across as enormously likeable. We’re also invited — sometimes not very subtly — to consider the whole business of what ‘normal’ means, with some of his behaviour clearly meant to seem an exaggerated, or simply more honest, version of everybody else’s.