"Autistic representation" in media is the wrong approach
A tale of two TV doctors
Remember “The Good Doctor”? Yeah, that TV show about a doctor with autism everyone made memes about because it was so bad. Do you know who made it, though? That’s right, David Shore, the same guy who 10 years previously had created another show about a disabled and possibly autistic doctor, House MD. But everyone loved House! Why, after proving that he could portray a character like that in a convincing and relatable way, did Shore fuck it up so badly the second time around? Paul Skallas, also known as LindyMan, has a theory that House and The Good Doctor were so different because in the 10 years in between the two shows beginning, the cultural zeitgeist underwent a sharp change.
In LindyMan’s telling, House was a product of the tail end of the “vulgar wave”, a period lasting from the early 90s to the late 2000s where most popular media was tailored towards the tastes of young men. The theme song from Family Guy, an archetypal vulgar wave show (in fact, it’s a vulgar pastiche of a slightly pre-vulgar wave show, The Simpsons), is a neat summation of what the media landscape was like:
It seems today, that all you see, is violence in movies and sex on TV. But where are those good old fashioned values, on which we used to rely?
For a hospital drama, House MD was about as vulgar as you could get. The main character lived his life trying to see how many people he could offend, and for the most part he got away with it! Yeah, he commits grievous medical malpractice at least once an episode, but he drops sarcastic one-liners while doing it and he always manages to cure the patient in the end. He’s just that damn good. After all, if he followed the rules the show wouldn’t be very exciting, and maximum excitement is what young men crave. You can’t blame them, really.
Meanwhile, LindyMan continues, The Good Doctor belonged to another world. This was the post-Occupy, post-GamerGate, Trump 1.0 era, when young men suddenly became the demographic that the media was least excited to pander to. Representational concerns were now the be-all and end-all of what media should look like. Characters were expected to wear their identities on their sleeves, and remind the audience of who and what they are in every scene. Edgy comedy and gratuitous violence were thrown out of the window in favour of “affirming” stories where the selling point is the main character’s identity, and the focus is on their personal victimhood, their struggles and their triumphs over adversity. The Good Doctor was one such story. We can see this in the differences in the characters of the two doctors themselves: Dr. House is an older, rugged man who swears, verbally abuses his coworkers, and does drugs to cope with his pain, while the titular Good Doctor is boyish, sensitive, soft-spoken, and generally behaves as if a light breeze would knock him over.
A compelling explanation, definitely, but LindyMan’s analysis only goes so far. We know why The Good Doctor was so different from House MD, but why was it so much worse? It’s possible to make a gritty, serious and realistic show about a complex character who tries his (well, usually her, but let’s not go into that now) best to live in a world that wasn’t made for him. That type of story need not be obnoxiously “woke”, although most of them were. Where The Good Doctor fell down was in its insistence on explicitly stating what its main character’s condition was. This is a hallmark of the woke era: at some point it was decided (by who? We aren’t allowed to ask) that implicit acknowledgement was tantamount to erasure, which is how we got all those increasingly ugly defaced Pride flags, unwieldy acronyms that nevertheless still ended in a +, and “this disproportionately affects X, Y, and Z people” tacked onto the end of every sentence explaining a bad thing even when it wasn’t particularly relevant.
The problem with sticking a label such as autism on a character is that it severely restricts how that character will be allowed to behave, by removing all plausible deniability as to what exactly their condition is. Activists for said condition will scrutinise everything the character does and treat any deviation from their idea of “accuracy” as a personal assault on them. In the case of autism, it’s practically impossible to satisfy everyone because autism varies so wildly in how it presents. This is one of the reasons why I think phasing out the “Asperger’s syndrome” diagnosis was a mistake, but that’s another story. Anyway, portraying the Good Doctor as either uniformly high-functioning or uniformly low-functioning would be inaccurate as seen by people on the other end of the spectrum, so the only solution was to give him an unrealistic mix of low and high-functioning traits that still left nobody happy.
This disaster could have easily been avoided, and in fact House had already showed how it could be done. The stated concern of “autistic representation” is not actually having autistic characters but having characters that autistic people can relate to, however that’s definitely not what it does. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Good Doctor isn’t relatable. But Dr. House was relatable, at least for some people, and he behaved in a way that indicated he could in theory be autistic even if he was never labelled as such. Crucially, this meant that even the most annoying activists could not level a critique stronger than “I personally don’t relate to this character”, to which “Well, that’s not our problem” is not an offensive response.
For something invisible like autism, it is always best to leave your audience a free choice whether to identify with your characters or not. No matter how well you write them, someone will always find something you’ve done wrong, but if you put a label on them for the sake of “representation” that gives that person a licence to take it as an attack on their identity when they couldn’t have done so otherwise. Maybe now, with the total media hegemony of identity politics seeming to recede, the writers’ rooms will apply this lesson again.