Stream It Or Skip It?
As the public’s knowledge of autism grows, there is an increasing number of neurodivergent characters on TV and in films that are not only portrayed by neurodivergent actors, but also don’t display the robotic, unfeeling characteristics that autistic characters have shown even in the recent past. In a new British mystery series that originally aired on the UK’s Channel 4 in January (and already filmed a second season), a criminal records clerk becomes a civilian investigator for a Yorkshire police detective because of the special skills her autism brings to those investigations.
PATIENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: As a young woman puts a notebook and a watch in front of her, timing herself as she tries to take links of a metal rod, a man tries to take £8,000 from his bank.
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The Gist: The man, who seems to be in a trance, demands that the money be withdrawn. He drives to the top of a parking garage, puts the envelope with the cash in a trash can, then sets himself on fire.
York police DI Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser) is called in by her boss, Calvin Baxter (Mark Benton), to look into the case. She and her team, including her investigative partner, DS Jake Hunter (Nathan Welsh), are told that it’s initially considered a suicide, but given the victim’s connections, Baxter wants to make doubly sure of it.
At the same time, Patience Evans (Ella Maisy Purvis) waits to get on the bus to go to her job at the York Police’s criminal records office, a part of a routine she never wavers from. A man who sees her there every day tries to ask her out. She gives her number but says she never answers unknown calls because “I don’t like surprises.”
Bea finds out the dead man was a psychiatrist, and she and Hunter recall another suicide by someone in the same profession a few years prior. When the call is made to pull the records from the previous suicide, Patience pulls those files — plus the files of other suicides she feels follow the same pattern.
When a curious Bea goes down to CRO to find Patience, she finds out that her particular “weirdness” is not well liked by some, and this isn’t the first time she’s overstepped when pulling files. But Bea, who sneaks into the archive room to find Patience, is impressed with how she was able to make the links between the previous suicides and earlier ones.
Patience has found other connections, but has to rehearse her call to Bea, being thrown when Bea answers “Yes?” instead of “Hello?”. But Patience ends up going to Bea’s office to give her “probable links” between this case and others where people were under the influence of scopolamine, a drug that, with the right dose, can put the victim’s mind under the influence of someone else.
As the links that Patience has been making work out, Bea follows her to see what her life is like — Patience refuses a ride from Bea due to it not being part of her routine — and sits in on a support group meeting of autistic adults. When some of the members speak, Bea is reminded of some of the things she sees in her pre-teen son.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Patience is a cross between The Good Doctor and Elementary.
Our Take: Created by Matt Baker and based on the French series Astrid et Raphaëlle, Patience gets a lot of things right. Purvis, who is neurodivergent, shows how Patience can be so good at spotting patterns and being hyperfocused on tasks, like sorting through mountains of evidence to spot those patterns. But she also shows that Patience, like millions of people with autism, isn’t a robotic, unempathetic figure. Her brain works differently than those who are considered to be neurotypical, but that doesn’t mean that she is distant and unrelatable.
Patience’s story is told through flashbacks, where we see the 11-year-old version of herself (Ava-Grace Cook) with her police officer father, being told by a psychiatrist that she might be schizophrenic. As Patience’s godfather, Douglas Gilmour (Adrian Rawlins), tells Bea in the second part of this episode, autism was just not diagnosed in girls in the ’90s, and her father refused to believe that she was mentally ill, just different.
One of the things that the show gets right is just how autism might be evident in a person like Patience: She likes her routines, social interactions make her overwhelmed but she has ways to manage them, and if she gets too overwhelmed she can “burn out,” or basically shut down.
Anyone who has an autistic person in their lives has seen these behaviors; thankfully, with what we know about autism in the 2020s, autism is truly seen as a spectrum. The idea that people can become exhausted by masking their behavior to fit in, and it’s better when people with autism are in an environment that lets them be themselves is something that is now widely accepted. It’s seen in the character of Bea, who seems to be much more tolerant of what is perceived to be Patience’s quirky behavior than most of her colleagues are.
Bea sees what Patience can bring to an investigation via her ability to catch patterns others miss, and her determination to find solutions to puzzles. What we hope is that, as the series goes along and Patience participates in more cases, the rest of the people in the squad room will see her as Bea sees her, as an asset instead of someone who is “weird” and can’t handle police work.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Patience is brought in for questioning because she’s seen on the parking garage’s CCTV, and one of the psychiatrists that committed suicide was the doctor who wanted her hospitalized when she was a kid.
Sleeper Star: Maxwell Whitelock plays Bea’s son Alfie, and we’re pretty sure Bea’s work with Patience is going to lead her to figure out if Alfie is neurodivergent, as well.
Most Pilot-y Line: None that we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Patience shows that its title character’s autism is an asset rather than a problem, and while there are time when Bea is a little flummoxed by Patience’s habits and routines, the show more often than not shows what a neurodivergent person can bring to a complex job like policing.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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