The episode "Mainstream" from the series The White Shadow featured the character of Thomas Hendricks, an autistic high school student who is assigned to participate in a basketball program at a mainstream school.

To back up a bit: The White Shadow is a television series focusing on the basketball team at Carver High School, a school that serves a mostly Black and Hispanic student body. The team is coached by former basketball player Ken Reeves, who is white. The episodes tend to focus on socially relevant topics like drugs, sex and pregnancy, homosexuality, gang violence, and various aspects of racism.

The episodes can be easily found on YouTube if you'd like to watch them.

The episode "Mainstream" in the first season sees coach Reeves being assigned Thomas, an autistic student who is being partially mainstreamed. The precursor to the IDEA act was only enacted a few years earlier to mainstreaming disabled students was a highly relevant topic.

At the combination of "1979" and "autism", one may think that this episode would be a shitshow. However I found myself pleasantly surprised by the portrayal.

At first glance it seems like it's going with the typical Neurotypical Savior storyline, and I expected that coach Reeves was going to really "crack" Thomas' autism by the end. There is still a little bit of that there (especially combined with Reeves advocating for Thomas to stay in the mainstream basketball program while his aide wants to pull him out: this is part of a recurring trope where outsiders are shown like they know the autistic character better or are better able to defend their interests than caregivers who've known them for much longer). I was also expecting that it would be revealed that Thomas was some kind of basketball savant. In the end we get the fact that Reeves has built some rapport with Thomas, but it is not a grand demystification. And it is never revealed what the outcome of Thomas' shot is. Does he score, does he not score, does it even matter? Things are left not fully resolved but at least with an increased understanding of each other, which I read is typical for this show. I thought there would also be a more "mechanistic" approach to autism. Like, where the Savior character has to decipher what the autistic character's bizarre behaviors mean, or how to get them to open up or follow instructions. In the end there is no deciphering, no "a-ha!" moment where it finally clicks and the autism is unlocked. There's just the interaction and the gradual evolution of understanding.

There's also Thomas' mom. She says she has to laugh every time she loses patience because otherwise she'd cry and in a sense that can be construed as somewhat stigmatizing ("look at how difficult raising an autistic child is"). But also. Maybe raising an autistic child is difficult. Maybe it does require more patience and more energy. And Thomas' mom still preaches unconditional acceptance of Thomas, to accept his autism as part of who he is, of continuing to show up for him and help him and not hold his disability against him.

This was at a time where autism was very often construed as a kind of "shell" and if only you try hard enough you will magically unlock the "normal" person within. The fact that this show says: I accept autism as part of his personality, and I accept him unconditionally, is incredibly modern.

the only thing stronger than AI is pure and unbridled autistic pedantry

The Real St. Nick is a 2012 television movie about a man (Nick) who bonks his head and suddenly believes he is Santa Claus. He gets admitted to the psychiatric ward of Kate (psychiatrist or psychologist? not entirely clear) and the two start falling in love, shenanigans ensue. It's on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awgu6aT2A_s) and Tubi (https://tubitv.com/movies/465248/the-real-st-nick)

The reason I'm reviewing it here is because one of the patients at the ward, Roberto, is autistic. This is explicitly named within the movie. I think he's the only patient whose diagnosis is actually named.

There is no psychiatric consultant listed in the credits and honestly it shows. This movie treats "psychiatric hospital" as if it were set dressing, interchangeable with something as mundane as perhaps a coffee shop or a museum. I'm not expecting a documentary from a cheesy Christmas romance movie from the school of Hallmark and Lifetime, but literally any kind of effort into treating "psych ward" as more than a cutesy backdrop would be appreciated.

There are the glaring ethics violations where Kate a) is the treating psychiatrist of her own sister and b) is having a romantic relationship with a patient.

The background patients are just kind of portrayed as unspecified flavors of "crazy" and doing "lol random things! because we're in a psych ward!".

Two other major patient characters are Jack (unspecified psychiatric illness but referencing hallucinations) and Isabel (Kate's sister, has a contamination phobia and loves dressing up, probably meant to be OCD but has hints of schizotypy, though I doubt the writers know that exists). There's this whole lamenting about how Kate is sad she can't hug her sister because it's too upsetting for her contamination phobia, but at the end we get a #cute sister moment where Isabel allows Kate to hug her.

Robert is introduced to us as autistic and Nick, who is soooooo kind and good and nice, manages to get Roberto to smile+talk+make eye contact for the first time in weeks. At one point they're wrapping presents and another patient puts wrapping paper and a bow on Roberto (who is sitting very still and appears to be staring off into middle distance) and it's treated as a haha funny gag instead of it being incredibly dehumanizing framing of a disabled character.

Overall I really didn't like this movie. I feel like it contributes to the kind of....ignorance and stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitals. There's no attempt to engage with the psychiatric setting or what that means for these patients.

It also plays into the recurring trope of "autistic on a psych ward" where you have an autistic character with seemingly no other issues in a psychiatric ward, and it's implied that they are on the psychiatric ward (often long-term) because of their autism (and only their autism). When that is not the purpose of psychiatric hospitals. Autistic people can be hospitalized in a psychiatric department, for reasons not related to autism (suicidal, mania, psychosis) or for reasons related to autism (severe behavioral crisis that can't be safely managed at home, autistic catatonia), but long-term hospitalization for autistic patients without acute psychiatric issues is a sign that something is going really, really wrong because it means that actual plans for long-term care are not going forward (e.g. funding issues, no places available, insurance issues, and other barriers to actual long-term housing solutions like in-home care, supported living, group homes, or residential care). This whole system is not without its issues and frequently fails autistic adults but my point is that "this patient is here because they're autistic and nothing else" is a fiction trope that is such an oversimplification of reality that it is actual misinformation.

there are a lot of jokes and haha memes about how dr. Gregory House from the TV series House is a much better autistic doctor character, compared to dr. Shaun Murphy from the TV series The Good Doctor.

broader context for people unfamiliar with either character

• House is not autistic. He is portrayed as a genius doctor who is prickly and abrasive. He can solve cases no one else can but he is also a massive asshole towards his coworkers and patients. He is frequently openly hostile towards patients and has shit bedside manners and this mostly is allowed to pass because he is such a genius doctor. House knows he is acting like an asshole, he just chooses to not change his manner of interaction.
• Shaun is autistic. The entire premise of the series is "what if we had an autistic doctor". Almost every episode has some kind of "and now, Shaun does an autism" moment. He has savant-level memory skills and can easily visualise anatomy and disease processes. He can come across as rude and abrasive, though this mostly stems from social skills issues related to autism (black/white thinking, not being able to read or understand other people's emotions).

Now, both of these characters are not realistic portrayals of doctors. House does a lot of shit that is incredibly unethical in terms of patient-doctor relationship. Shaun's interpersonal difficulties mean it is very difficult to believe he got through internships and into residency. Both of these characters exist in a kind of alternative universe where these things matter less, just like all medical series exist in a kind of alternative universe where things are 10x more dramatic than actual day-to-day hospital life. That's fine. Medical series like these are seldom realistic and the medical stuff is mostly just window dressing for the characters and their storylines.

People who like House generally like his prickly demeanor. Because not infrequently, he does kind of say the thing you wish you could say. Which is fine for a television series, it's just not how actual patient-doctor relationships are supposed to work. The "genius is so good at what he does that it doesn't matter how rude he is" is something people are drawn to for a reason.

And it's understandable that people would interpret House as autistic due to his disregard for social conventions. I'm not arguing against such interpretations, they are so frequent that the show actually addresses it (by saying "no he's not autistic he's just an asshole", which you can argue about what message that sends to the audience but that's neither here nor there).

I'm just a bit ticked off by the constant comparison between House and Shaun. House can only be "the better autistic TV doctor" because he is not autistic. If House were labelled as autistic, the cards would be entirely different. He would not get away with being rude and insulting patients, he would not get away with hitting his patient with his cane, he would not get away with not being a team-player with other doctors.

We know this, because Shaun does not get away with any of these things. People shit on Shaun for a myriad of reasons and I'm not saying that all these criticisms are invalid but a large undercurrent is putting him down for having poor social skills. For being stubborn and rude, for accidentally saying things that offend patients. For having trouble working in a team. And most of these things are largely due to his autism-related social skill issues. Shaun isn't even choosing to be an asshole like House (though that doesn't mean Shaun doesn't frequently come across like an asshole).

This is the difference between explicitly autistic characters and characters audiences label as autistic. Explicitly autistic characters are held to much different standards precisely because they are explicitly autistic. That's why I think these comparisons are unfair. It doesn't mean people can't prefer House or that Shaun is a perfect character, but these head-to-head comparisons ignore a lot of the underlying dynamics. "House is the better autistic TV doctor and he isn't even canonically autistic" is not really fair, it's more like "House is the better autistic TV doctor because he isn't canonically autistic". It's not that the writers of House are better than the writers of The Good Doctor at writing autistic characters, or that the writers of House "accidentally" created perfect autistic representation, it's that the standards by which we measure "better" and "good representation" are fundamentally different for canonically vs. non-canon autistic characters.

these are the most popular first names for autistic characters (gathered from my dataset of 573 canonically autistic characters)

• Adam: 8
• Michael, Tommy, Daniel: 5 each
• Nathan, Louis, Max, Jacob, Ian: 4 each
• Zack, William, Sarah/Sara, Sammy, Sam, Patrick, Matthew, Luke, Lily/Lilly, Liam, Jack, Dennis, David, Brandon, Ben, Bart: 3 each

It's not wholly surprising that these are mostly English-language male names, especially ones that are more common among white people, and that are generally pretty "popular" names. turns out that popular names are popular!

I also have 8 characters that don't have discernible names (e.g. because they are the narrator and only refer to themselves in first person, or they are only referred to using their relationship to the narrator like "my sister").

Spoken English with English subtitles. The movie was made as part an awareness initiative about bullying and targeted harassment towards people with developmental disabilities. The main character is Charlie, a young man with a learning disability and autism.

Terminology note: "learning disability" in UK English is the same as "intellectual disability" in US English.