Repeat after me: "Adelia Adelie Emperor and Chinstrap. Adelia Adelie Emperor and Chinstrap." Got it? Good. You've just entered the magical world of Atypical. Where you'll meet Sam, the protagonist of the Netflix series about a teenager who is "on the spectrum"—that is, somewhere on the autism spectrum.
Sam is what we'd call a "high-functioning autistic." He can do certain things—memorize lists or numbers, for instance—far better than most people. But he's completely overwhelmed by situations that trigger emotional stress. When Sam was very young, his mother taught him a kind of "relaxation chant." At one point in the series, he explains: "Whenever I get stressed, I recite the names of the four species of Antarctic penguin: Adelia, Adelie, Emperor, and Chinstrap. It helps. You should try it next time you think you're dying. Unless you're actually dying. In that case, it won't help at all."
As you've gathered, Sam is pretty likeable. I wish I had room to describe him more fully, so even without Netflix you'd get a sense of who he is. But we're talking about Sam not to promote the series—it hardly needs it—but to think through how people with disabilities are shown on television.
Twenty years ago now, Ombre e Luci published a report on a study by the Institute for Economic and Social Research in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, carried out with four social cooperatives across Italy. TV and newspapers came under heavy fire for how they portrayed people with disabilities. The main complaint: they failed to show the "ordinary disabled person," instead pushing two opposing stereotypes.
On one side: the "patient"—someone crushed by unspeakable suffering, with no room left for anything else. No social life, no personal growth, no independence. Just a wasteland of dread, into which only healers or consolers can venture. On the other: the "superhero"—the person of extraordinary willpower who achieves something remarkable in a particular field: sport, politics, entertainment.
That was the picture twenty years ago. Has much changed? It's a complicated question. Let me offer a few scattered thoughts.
Thank God, it seems the obsession with "spectacularizing suffering" has largely vanished from the conversation. Do you remember when disabled people would show up in films or commercials, and someone would immediately raise a hand and say, "No, this isn't right! You're exploiting pain for ratings or to sell more"? The idea behind it was that this person was there as a "patient," not as a person. And that they couldn't assess for themselves whether someone was exploiting them.
I think we've made real progress on showing the "ordinary disabled person" too. And in some cases, we've done it by turning the old stereotypes to good use. When Bebe Vio sits in her room for an interview and talks about the challenges and triumphs of a Paralympic athlete, she's telling a story that starts from the "superhero" model but branches into countless everyday anecdotes that would once have been thought trivial or even unseemly.
And then there's Atypical. An entire television series from an entertainment giant about an autistic teenager—his family, his job, school, love, friends. We should say "wow." And we're right to, because Sam is woven into a rich social fabric. He's not a foreign body, not the "other," as he would have been in the old "patient" or "superhero" models. But there's a catch: that social world of understanding friends, good therapists, part-time work, and school support groups exists on TV but not in our reality. That doesn't undo what I've said about how disability is portrayed, though. If anything, it shows us a direction to move toward.
Our kids' lives may never be exactly like that. But maybe someday, when someone on the street sees a person reciting the names of penguins, instead of laughing, they'll just say: "Look, there's Sam."