Autism in a TV drama

I reviewed the first series of Patience last year. This year she is back, I watched the final episode last night, with eight episodes in the second series, rather than the six of series one. Most of the regulars are back, too; the most obvious is one of the main leads, Laura Fraser, who played DI Bea Metcalf, is replaced by Jessica Hynes as DI Frankie Monroe.

Each episode is about solving an individual crime, but there are two overarching story lines: Patience Evans, who works in the police archives and is played brilliantly by Ella Maisy Purvis, and DI Monroe go from distrust of each other to trust but not understanding by the end of the series. The other story arc is that Patience starts to develop a romantic interest.

What makes Patience such a good series for me is the way Autism is portrayed. There is no stereotyping of neurodiversity; Patience’s autism is in the plot, which centres around how people who think differently can complement each other. Autism is never the point; this is a crime drama, and how the police work is the point.

In the first series, DI Mecalf was the emotional person who empathised with victims, and Parience was able to see connections between things, particularly those in the archive. Series two has DI Monroe, new to the job and a stickler to rules, who also exhibits little empathy. Both DI Monroe and Patience.

What I didn’t like:

There is a lack of continuity between the two series. The police station has changed externally, though both are concrete brutalist buildings. That is an improvement as the new location is less brutal. There are fewer shots of York itself. York has abbey ruins, set in a botanical garden, and has Britain’s National Railway Museum. Two episodes used an abbey, one a botanical garden and one a railway museum. All used locations in Belgium. Episode 7 used a location in a Belgian monastery. Why not use Ambleforth Abbey near York, or the House of the Resurrection in Mirfield, less than 40 miles from York? It is probably because this is a Belgian/UK co-production, based on the Franco-Belgian show Astrid et Raphaëlle, being shown in the UK as Astrid in Paris. Still, I’d have liked to have seen at least as much of York as there was in the first series.

Mark Benton, playing DCI Calvin Baxter, is one of the best of the supporting cast. The way he rolls his eyes and sighs in a world-weary way, when news of another crime comes in, says more than several lines of dialogue could. Good acting, sir.

I recommend Patience to anyone, not just for the most realistic portrayal of autism on TV (though Dr John Watson says Sherlock Holmes has Asperger’s in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock a few years back), but because it is a great crime drama. Both series of Patience are available on Channel 4’s catch up service.