Love on the Spectrum’s Deficit Lens

Midway through the first episode of Netflix’s inaugural season of Love on the Spectrum US, I had the same sinking that haunted the two seasons of the original Australian series: god, it’s all so neurotypical.

I didn’t know (beyond a long-held suspicion) that I was Autistic until I was 36. For many years, I, too, went on nice, ‘normal’ dinner dates and pondered how to keep the conversation going when I actually wanted to run in the opposite direction. I wondered when was too early—or too late—to kiss, and what to do if the person smelled weird, or touched my hands too much, or ate with their mouth open. I read all the Cosmopolitan articles and ‘Ask Polly’ letters about love and dating, and tried to work out what I was so clearly doing very wrong. It is impossible to understate the impact ableist and heteronormative ideas about dating and relationships have on Autistic people who are keen to find a partner. Like so many Autistic people, diagnosed or otherwise, I was coming at life through a deficit lens—and nowhere was this more evident than in my perceived ‘inability’ to navigate the world of dating. This misconception was, in fact, one of the main reasons I pursued assessment in the first place: I am so bad at relationships that I must be Autistic.

It is impossible to understate the impact ableist and heteronormative ideas about dating and relationships have on Autistic people.

This is my enduring problem with Love on the Spectrum, which presents Autism as a dilemma to be solved on the road to romantic success. Autism is framed as a challenge that has held these people back, rather than the thing that makes them so wonderfully unique. To be clear: I absolutely love to see Autistic people on my television, and I wish it happened more often. Every participant in the three series has been fantastic, even if the show’s casting has failed to truly represent the gender diversity and broad range of sexualities within the Autistic community. Its casting also, with a few notable exceptions, perpetuates the manner in which academic Paul Heilker has observed Autism as ‘being rhetorically constructed in public discourse as an overwhelmingly white condition.’ This new season does acknowledge that there are a wide variety of communication and support needs among Autistic people, as well as intersecting disabilities, without resorting to use of the dreaded ‘levels’ or, worse, functioning labels. Those are all admirable things for a popular show to convey—I just wish I didn’t have to watch these people suffer through this particular context.

By now, Love on the Spectrum’s formula is well established: we meet a variety of Autistic people who are looking for love, hear about their hopes and dreams (and, typically, those of their parents or guardians) and their special interests and phobias, and watch as they navigate set-ups with willing suitors. Co-creator Cian O’Clery often speaks to the participants from behind the camera. There is an ‘Autism expert’ who helps the cast members learn more about how to interact with dates. When someone says something awkward or the conversation stalls—like Kaelynn telling her date about birds’ cloacas, which seems like standard dinner party conversation material to me—there’ll be a musical cue that tells us a major romantic faux pas has just occurred. Netflix’s first ‘in-house’ season, after two ABC-produced Australian iterations, adds a little more serialisation, complete with cliffhanger episode endings, but otherwise essentially continues this formula.

The predominant response to the show is typified by one review’s headline: ‘Love Never Felt So Pure’. Yet there’s rarely acknowledgement that Love on the Spectrum is as much a reality series as The Bachelorette or Beauty and The Geek. The show is produced and edited for effect, in this case, extracting both maximum perceived awkwardness and ‘innocent’ romance from the participants’ dates. What’s remarkable is how so many of the reviews by non-Autistic writers tie themselves in knots to avoid describing the cast as Autistic; they are ‘on the spectrum’ or ‘neurodiverse’. The show, too, tiptoes around explicit discussion of Autism, beyond establishing that it’s been hard for these people to find a date and keep a relationship going (quiet voice: because Autism). It’s a warm and fuzzy icing on the old stale cake: that Autism can only be understood through narratives of struggle and challenge. There’s also no deeper discussion—beyond things that happen spontaneously, like Dani’s date Solomon being startled by the sound of a champagne cork popping—of how, for example, sensory sensitivities or other aspects of Autistic experience come into play in the romantic arena. It also places, by way of guiding the participants in appropriate date conversation, major emphasis on verbal communication, when many Autistic people (whether they are speaking or nonspeaking) use texts, emails, and augmentative and alternative communication methods and devices to interact.

(One way in which Love on the Spectrum US has improved upon its Australian predecessor is that its resident expert, Jennifer Cook, is herself Autistic, with her late-diagnosis allowing her to offer a sort of cultural translation between Autistic and neurotypical modes of communication.)

Love on the Spectrum is as much a reality series as The Bachelorette.

In a feature for Netflix’s online magazine, Tudum, Autistic writer Sarah Kurchak asked O’Clery to acknowledge his privilege in being a non-Autistic person given the platform to deliver these stories, when Autistic people struggle to be considered the authors of their own ones. His reply was telling, and not particularly edifying: ‘First and foremost, I don’t believe that, if somebody is from a certain community, they can only tell stories about their community. I think there shouldn’t be any rules about who is allowed to be a storyteller. Otherwise, I think somebody like me, who’s a documentary maker, could only make stories about somebody like me, and I don’t think that’s the way the world should work.’

And yet, that’s the way it should work, at least part of the time. I am an Autistic screenwriter, trying to tell Autistic stories, and it’s bloody hard. This is not only because my inherently Autistic approaches to screenwriting practice may not wash with the accepted orthodoxies of the form (see: my PhD research, coming soon to a library near you), but because the industry still operates in a way that—given emphasis on networking, long work hours, hustle culture and the enduring nightmare of direct-to-camera pitch videos—excludes, or in best case scenarios, puts great strain upon Autistic people.

O’Clery’s response to Kurchak’s valid line of questioning made me think of another, far more successful example of a non-Autistic documentarian working with Autistic subjects, Alex Lehmann’s 2016 Asperger’s Are Us. Tracing a year in the touring lives of the eponymous stand-up comedy troupe, all of whom are Autistic, the film’s rambling, mumblecore-adjacent approach allowed the stars to shine. (Am I saying that mumblecore is an inherently Autistic genre? Maybe.) There is no attempt to strip the troupe’s humour, or their experience in the world, of its Autistic nature. There was no sequence where a B-tier comedian came in to tell the guys how they were doing stand-up wrong—indeed, as the New York Times review noted, Lehmann’s camera ‘catches sight of audience members who walked out, mid-performance’—and no ‘storytime’ voiceover, only the heavenly freedom of Autistic people interacting Autistically.

I also think Mick Jackson did a great job of representing Autistically visual and associative  ways of thinking in the HBO movie, Temple Grandin, a film that I have regularly used as an effective teaching tool when trying to explain the way my brain operates. Nobody’s saying non-Autistic people aren’t allowed to tell Autistic stories, we just want them to tell those stories well and with our involvement.

Love on the Spectrum is made from a non-Autistic positionality, for a non-Autistic audience. It is a show that aims to humanise by infantilising: see, Autistic people aren’t scary like that A Current Affair expose you once saw! Its ‘experts’ mean well, but offer bafflingly retrograde ideas about dating that would seem outmoded to any contemporary non-Autistic singleton, which take on the uncomfortable whiff of the contested ABA ‘therapy’ in the context of the show’s Autistic participants and can only be read as an attempt to make them less Autistic. ‘What is the point of having someone go through motions when the other person may not even notice or care?’ Autistic writer Sara Luterman asked in her review of the first season. ‘Why instruct two autistic people to look at each other’s faces and smile?’

Love on the Spectrum is made from a non-Autistic positionality, for a non-Autistic audience.

The moments in Love on the Spectrum that are most affecting, as an Autistic viewer, are probably the ones that engender laughter or bemusement in the non-Autistic viewer. Kaelynn reading the venue’s menu and drinks list in advance because her dyslexia and dyscalculia will be exacerbated by the stress of the date. Subodh and Rachel singing ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ while doing the very same at the beach. Dani and Adan engaging in echolalia at a speed dating event by swapping movie quotes and character voices. I absolutely related to these moments. To touch on the latter examples, it is nearly impossible for me not to share echolalic enthusiasm when I hear a word or music or do something that activates the Unix system in my mind. There’s nothing better than pinging ‘quotes’ back and forth with Autistic friends and family members, where ‘exchanging the taxonomic list’, as Autistic author Anthony Easton has written, ‘becomes an act of solidarity and intimacy.’ (In fact, I return to that quote repeatedly in my writing about Autism, in an act of academic and critical echolalia.) This associative way of engaging with the world is one of the many ways in which Autistic-to-Autistic communication is, actually, more complex and effective than non-Autistic Autism narratives would have you believe.

You don’t have to just take my word for it; a 2020 study demonstrated that ‘Autistic people have the skills to share information well with one another and experience good rapport, and that there are selective problems when Autistic and non-Autistic people are interacting.’ Now who’s got the deficit in social communication?

Love on the Spectrum tries admirably to organise dates that reflect the participants’ special interests and passions—such as a set-up for the effervescent Abbey, who is mad about wild animals and The Lion King, at a safari sanctuary—but maintains a strictly neurotypical notion of how said dates should unfold within those spaces. Pioneering Autism rights activist Jim Sinclair once wrote, ‘Autistic social rules develop and evolve naturalistically within autistic space, just as social rules and customs develop naturalistically within any other community. Autistic rules and customs reflect common characteristics of autistic people.’ Is a formal dinner date, with attendant expectations of social airs and graces, the best place to foster Autistic space? I’m not so sure.

Love on the Spectrum’s mostly subtle—but occasionally overt—positionality is that it is the participants’ ‘Autisticness’ that is the stumbling block in their romantic travails, rather than the same stuff that ‘normal’ people decide makes someone a hard pass or a dream date. So, the show doesn’t present the fact that, for example, Dani just doesn’t vibe with Solomon’s commitment to the law of attraction as a valid reason for her not wanting a third date, the editing and framing tells us it’s because she’s too rigid in her desire to meet someone who shares her passion for animation. When James’ second date ends with a request for friendship, not a third date, he is pictured standing alone on the hillside at the Renaissance faire in his medieval garb; it’s hard not to read this mise-en-scene as whispering, ‘If only he wasn’t so intense about dressing up or swords.’ (This is, as I put it in my memoir Late Bloomer, the ‘you don’t make friends with steam train facts’ mindset.) Yes, Autism can be hard, but it’s not only that. I have dated Autistic people, and non-Autistic people, and the relationships ended for the same sad, boring reasons any relationship does, because on some level those people and I weren’t a good match—not ‘because I’m Autistic’.

I want TV that is Autistic in nature, not just in subject matter.

As I watched Love on the Spectrum US, I kept thinking: I want a dating show that’s made by Autistic people. I want to see Autistic people interacting Autistically, without a life coach or producer hovering nearby to get things back on track. I want an Autistic dating show that doesn’t end on a parent’s perspective, but on that of the Autistic people involved.

But it goes deeper than just hoping that there might be an Autistic dating show that avoids the missteps of Love on the Spectrum. I want TV that is Autistic in nature, not just in subject matter. I want a show that demonstrates, as comedian New Michael Ingemi says in Asperger’s Are Us, how you can do ‘things that are really, really great, not in spite of having Autism, but through it.’ I want editing that is associative and echolalic. And, to paraphrase Rupaul, I don’t want to hear any fucking infantilising library music cues.