Synopsis: Sam, an 18-year-old on the autism spectrum, decides it’s time to find a girlfriend, a journey that sets Sam’s mom on her own life-changing path as her son seeks more independence. (Source: IMDB)
My Thoughts:
For a series named as ‘Atypical’, this series was too generic and typical. Yeah, I know that this series is a coming-of-age story about a teen who suffers from autism, and how he tackles teenage problems like love, sex and independence. When I said this series was generic and typical, what I mean was if we take out the ‘autism’ in the premise, the story flows like any other coming-of-age series out there. It was easy to predict how the story would go and it was hard to empathize with the characters. They were too cliche to a point, I skipped most of their scenes and still, I end up feeling like I didn’t miss out any important stuff. It would have been better if the other characters were written well or add more spark to their cliched personalities. Sigh.
I liked the comedic aspect of the series. It made the series more lighthearted and easy to watch. I only liked the drama aspect involving the main character, others…meh. Like I said, too cliche. I also liked the actor playing the main character. He is very convincing as an autistic teenager. Well, all the actors and actresses in the series were really really good.
As a Psychology graduate, I do know every aspect about autism. The autism spectrum is very broad and quite complicated to discuss. And from what I had seen from the series, they pretty much took the ‘general route’ rather than the specific one. What I meant was that Sam, the protagonist, represents all of the austistic teenagers. They didn’t specify much what specific autistic behaviour Sam suffers, on the other hand, they chose to show the general and known symptoms and ticks of an autistic person. And I don’t blame them. If they went all out specific, they might get blacklash mostly from the autism community cuz they couldn’t relate. Each autistic person has their own unique set of symptoms after all.
The main purpose of this series was to let the people, the audience watching, to know and understand the people who has autism and see a world in their perspective. This series is in a way, educating people that even though they might act and do stuff differently, people with autism are still human beings.
Overall, this series is a good binge-watch. It had good moments and is enjoyable to watch. I recommend this to all people who hasn’t watch this on netflix.
Thanks for reading.
That is all.
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