[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Patience series premiere.]
Neurodivergent characters are getting more frequent representation on TV. BritBox’s Ludwig, while not outright saying that its titular character is on the autism spectrum, shows how neurodivergent, out-of-the-box thinking can help solve crimes. PBS Masterpiece’s newest detective series, Patience, does something similar, but this time through drama instead of comedy, and it is explicitly about a woman with autism. The June 15 Patience series premiere debuted Ella Maisy Purvis as Patience Evans, a young autistic woman whose work in the York Criminal Records Office changes when Detective Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser) recognizes her unique powers of deduction and asks her to join her team.
Purvis herself has autism, and she made frequent contributions to the character’s creation thanks to that, both behind the scenes and through her performance. And there are neurodivergent writers in the writer’s room. Patience‘s lead writer, Matt Baker, tells TV Insider that he is not neurodivergent but has a cousin who has autism, which made him aware of the lived experience of neurodivergent people tangentially. The series is based on the French series Astrid et Raphaëlle. Some details in the first episode and beyond are pulled directly from Astrid, such as Patience’s flow chart used to help her get through the anxiety of making phone calls. But this new adaptation did set out to paint a more evolved picture of people with autism by avoiding autistic stereotypes typically seen in media, even in Astrid to a degree.
“I think the original show is brilliantly clever. It’s got lots of creativity, lots of originality, but I think probably one of the criticisms of it was the portrayal of the autistic characters in it was, it lent more towards one end of the spectrum,” Baker explains. “And obviously having a lead character who was played by an actress who wasn’t neurodivergent potentially added to that criticism. I’m not making that as a personal criticism, it’s just an observation. What we set out to do was to try and make the characters who have the autism diagnosis or who are neurodivergent in the show seem less other.”
Patience Episode 1 shows Patience at an adults with autism support group, a detail from Astrid. Fraser’s Detective Bea observes one of Patience’s meetings after they first meet, as she’s trying to get a better understanding of how Patience’s mind works. She’s the only person at work who noticed a pattern in a string of mysterious deaths, making Patience an asset in Bea’s POV, but colleagues at the precinct are convinced that Patience is a threat to their investigations and even wrongly accuse her of being connected to the latest suicide they’re investigating. Their pattern recognition skills aren’t as strong as Patience’s, but her curiosity about the patterns she found may have put her in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Baker details the changes to the characters seen at the autism support group. “In the original show, there’s a character called William who’s sort of Patience’s mentor, and he runs the autism support group. And let’s be honest, he’s a bit of a nerd,” he says. “There’s a stereotype [that autistic people all love] computers, model trains, that kind of thing. [In Astrid], it’s a slightly nerdy portrayal. And so in our show, Billy’s a much cooler character. He is into mountain biking, he dresses and he behaves in a much different way. So it is this idea that the characters are a bit less other.”
PBS
“They are people who fit into society, or are trying to fit into society but have these obvious points of difference,” Baker continues. “And with Patience, you see that coming out in the way she dresses, the way she speaks, the way she reacts, as opposed to the original portrayal in the show, which with Astrid is quite, again, she’s probably somebody who’s a little bit more nerdy, dare I say, a bit more other in the context of how she deals with stuff. We tried to bring it all down a bit. A lot of the portrayal comes from the brilliance of the performance. A lot of the credit for that goes to Ella because when you’re writing stuff like that, we left a lot of the reaction stuff to her. Typically as a writer you’re putting in reactions and stuff like this into the script. In this case we were sort of suggesting stuff, but it’s really her performance that really brings it to life.”
In short, they wanted to make autism look normal, because it is normal. Part of what makes having autism difficult is the fact that the world is set up for neurotypical brains. Neurodivergent is a blanket term (not a diagnosis) used for people with ADHD, autism, and other things that make them process information in ways that aren’t viewed as typical. Neurotypical is the antonym label. What Patience wants to make clear is that being neurodivergent isn’t inherently a hindrance. But it also doesn’t want to “minimize” the real stressors that living with autism can bring, Baker says. This is shown through Patience’s struggle with sensory stimuli such as loud, overlapping noises and unexpected touch, as well as social anxiety that comes from struggles to communicate. But he says that the more Patience and Bea get to know each other, the more Patience will feel capable of changing her life for the better.
The series is being very intentional with its depiction of women with autism specifically. As a flashback to Patience’s childhood showed in the series premiere, girls were often misdiagnosed with pediatric schizophrenia when they were showing signs of autism in their childhoods. This happened to Patience, who struggled to talk at all as a kid, and hearing a doctor tell her father that she’d essentially be a burden on his life and society forever was a traumatizing experience that still affects Patience as an adult. Research into autism, as well as the lived experiences of some of their writers, taught them that “for a long time people didn’t really think that women could have autism,” Baker shares. Having a woman with autism as the lead of this series gives them the opportunity to depict this history that adds deeper “dimension” to the story, he says. This, combined with having two women lead this crime procedural in a genre frequently dominated by male characters, is “why we were attracted to the story,” Baker says. “It did feel a bit different.”
There are a lot of crime shows, Baker notes. “If you’re going to do one, do one that brings a different dimension to it.”
Patience. Sundays, 8/7c, PBS