I watched Rainman with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise way back when I was in high school, long before I was diagnosed with autism myself. Back then, autism was diagnosed far less frequently and I would probably not have been seen as autistic, but just quiet, socially awkward, or later as having “Aspergers Syndrome.” More recently, there have been a spate of TV shows and other media about autistic people, but still often with the idea of something that makes the autistic person a “savant” or “extraordinary” in other ways. I’m thinking specifically about the shows “The Good Doctor” and “The Extraordinary Lawyer Woo.” But I think there are some serious problems with these depictions.
First, let me say that I was originally charmed by both of these latter shows. I was so happy to see autism depicted positively (such as it is) and with something of an attempt to show that this is a different way of seeing the world, not just a disability. The first two episodes are great, but as I kept watching, I have gotten increasingly frustrated at two things:
1. The need to make the audience believe that autistic people are valuable to humanity — but only if they are truly extraordinary in their abilities.
2. A needle-focus on the strange habits of autistic people, either sexually or in terms of inability to connect to others or their physical ways of moving in abnormal…
