When TV series and films take on fragility as a subject, the hardest challenge is always this: how do you show the world as it actually is? The pull toward stereotype is enormous. Break viewers' assumptions, and you risk pushing them away instead of drawing them in. The series As We See It takes this challenge seriously from the very title: the Italian distributor calls it Te lo racconto io (I'll Tell You Myself), but a more literal rendering would be "As We See It" or "From Our Perspective"—a way of signaling that the story comes directly from the vantage point of an autistic person.
Created by Jason Katims (who won an Emmy for the screenplay to Friday Night Lights in 2011), As We See It centers on the lives of three neurodivergent people sharing a semi-independent apartment. Violet, Harrison, and Jack—all played by actors who are actually autistic—are supervised by Mandy, an aspiring neurologist torn between pursuing her specialty in another city and continuing to work alongside the group. Each of the three has a distinct character and set of struggles: Violet is fixated on finding a boyfriend and having her first relationship, Harrison is terrified to leave the house or walk among crowds, while Jack struggles to relate to others because he's too bluntly honest.
The series isn't a masterpiece, and its visual style isn't particularly distinctive—except for the choice to shoot everything handheld, creating an intimate, almost documentary feel. But it stands out for this: true to its title, it tells a story careful not to slip into easy pity, instead building complex, uncomfortable, almost contradictory social dynamics that feel genuinely real. That's the recipe for escaping that tiresome sentimentality. Before anything else, Jack, Violet, and Harrison are people with distinct personalities—some likable, some maddening—regardless of their condition.
Take Violet's relationship with her brother Van. The conflict there is far from obvious: he constantly sets aside his own life, even sacrificing the chance at a relationship, to prioritize his sister. Despite his good intentions—rooted in love and worry—Van inevitably comes across as possessive and suffocating to Violet, who desperately wants independence. The friendship that develops between Harrison and his neighbor also offers plenty to think about: prejudice, the careless insensitivity toward those more fragile, often unconscious and unexamined.
It's a story careful not to slip into easy pity, instead building complex, uncomfortable, almost contradictory social dynamics that feel genuinely real.
It's a story careful not to slip into easy pity, instead building complex, uncomfortable, almost contradictory social dynamics that feel genuinely real.
As with Atypical, the dramatic moments in As We See It are lightened by well-timed bursts of humor. But compared to the Netflix series, the tone here is less adolescent and more adult. Both shows work toward better representation of social minorities, and it's encouraging to see such satisfying results. What's less encouraging is discovering that even these well-crafted stories struggle to reach a general audience: low viewership numbers led the studio to cancel the series after the first season. All eight episodes of As We See It are available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.