Your Typical Atypical Family: Streaming Apolitical Autism on Netflix

Abstract

Using Critical Disability Studies and Critical Autism Studies lenses, this article examines the first season of the Netflix series Atypical, a comedy/drama coming of age story centred on an autistic teenager and his family. Atypical promotes heightened visibility for autistic people in popular culture. However, in its first season, its construction of autism reveals a broader cultural valuation of particular forms of disability that can be managed and reformed, reflecting a medical model. It also does not engage the intense invisibility and bias against non-speaking autistic people, which in turn bolsters ideals of normality ( Mitchell & Snyder 2000 ; Darke 1998 ). Notably, the show’s main character is played by an actor who is not autistic and who can control and manage his autistic characteristics, and its first season only included one small part for an autistic actor, a part that was created retroactively to fit with the show; this made it exemplary of a retrofit ( Dolmage 2017 ). At the same time, normality is reproduced through the deployment of conventional and gendered family roles to illustrate how autism should be managed primarily by women. Ultimately, through the processes of playing autistic, retrofitting, moralizing conformity, and reproducing conventional family roles, the show’s first season promoted a very palatable and normalized form of autism. However, reception of the first season and the backlash it received led to changes in the second and third seasons, providing an excellent example of how autistic advocacy can shape popular culture.