The honesty game: dating with autism

Love on the Spectrum follows seven men and women and two couples living with autism, all looking for that special relationship.

Michael is concerned about his date in a scene from Love on the Spectrum.

Free-to-air

No matter who you are or where you live, the pursuit of love and companionship can be and, let’s face it, more often than not is, fraught with uncertainty. For young men and women on the autism spectrum, who face their own navigational needs with social interaction and communication, those challenges are amplified ­expon­entially. Add in the perils, pitfalls and fleeting victories of the dating scene, not to mention the hard work of maintaining a relationship once one is entered, and the chance for success ­diminishes significantly. No matter who you are.

Inspiration is important, and this motivation is provided with care and compassion in the new, locally produced four-part documentary series Love on the Spectrum, a measured, thorough look at this process as experienced in real-world settings by seven men and women as well as two couples who live with autism and are looking for, or managing, a relationship.

Tuesday’s first episode sets a tone of love and support as the program leads with Michael, 25, who lives in Wollongong with his bemused yet steadfastly supportive parents (“Children will ruin my chances at becoming wealthy,” Michael believes; “they kind of do,” agrees his mother, not unkindly). Though he’s never been out with a woman, he confidently believes “an A-plus partner looks like me” and proves it when he subsequently shares a few dates with Amanda and the understanding required of him comes to the fore.

Ruth and bus driver Thomas have been in a relationship for coming up on four years, long enough to be very comfortable around each other. Thomas, who says he’s “autistic enough to understand Ruth” also dotes on her, and their relationship seems solid.

Chloe identifies as bisexual and finds a connection while picking sunflowers with Lotus. Maddi’s ideal partner is “tall, muscular and rich” but, while her date with the perpetually optimistic, dinosaur-obsessed Mark is pleasant enough, the two go their own ways with measured successes. In later episodes, Kelvin takes the advice of one of two relationship specialists featured in the series and skilfully deploys them on a date for Teppanyaki. Olivia finds inspiration in a theatre group for people with disability, Andrew speed-dates in advance of his first real one-on-one outing with a woman, and 21-year-old couple Jimmy and Sharnae are very different yet also very ­committed.

And so it goes. Watching three of the four episodes made available in advance, the lasting takeaway is that the respect shown to these Australians by the filmmakers, who chose them from among hundreds considered, has resulted in moments of unguarded honesty and awkwardness — particularly the dates themselves — that reward both the viewer and the subjects. Of course those on the spectrum can find love, this series confidently proclaims, all it takes is — and here’s that word again — understanding.

Perceptive and important, this series is a valuable addition to the contemporary Australian television landscape and, to paraphrase Michael, an A-plus advocate for the hard yards required to find love on the spectrum.

Love on the Spectrum, Tuesday, 8.30pm, ABC and ABC iView.

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TV Bites

Hamish & Andy’s “Perfect” Holiday, Sunday, 7pm, Nine

After five years off the road, Hamish Blake and Andy Lee are back with another genial stateside excursion, a follow-up of sorts to their 2009 American Caravan of Courage that even revisits that guy in Texas who broke Andy’s nose during a gridiron match (they spike his strawberry pie with Vegemite). The hook over these three hour-long episodes is that the boys take turns planning surprise events for each other, with predictably surreal results. The first stop is Monroe, Washington’s Evergreen State Fairgrounds and Speedway, where they participate in a very American demolition derby-like figure-8 school bus race. Then it’s south to Las Vegas, where Andy has told Hamish he’ll be boxing; what he fails to mention is that his opponent is the off-the-charts hot Pepper X, the ingestion of which Hamish takes with a combination of courage and milk (“I can’t even handle medium at Nando’s”). After their Texas revenge trip, they’re off to visit a real-life wolverine in Alaska and then back to Vegas with a plan to beat the house. The show’s press kit promises “just-plain-crazy Americans along the way”, but in fact the trip is best described, like the duo themselves, as appealingly eccentric.

Who Do You Think You Are? UK, Monday, 7.30pm, SBS

Viewers right into series three of The Crown will be most interested in this July 2018 episode of the long-running original UK version, as the subject is no less than Olivia Colman, The Crown’s current Queen Elizabeth II. Shot prior to release of theatrical black comedy The Favourite, for which she won numerous high-profile awards, including an Oscar, for her performance as Queen Anne, this compelling hour finds Colman tracing her maternal great-great-great-grandmother from India to England to Scotland. “They’re very boring,” she says early on of her Norfolk-based family, “I’m probably the least adventurous person I know.” A warm, infectious personality, Colman puts the lie to that by diving enthusiastically into the mysteries of her heritage, which involve marital intrigue, a surprise inheritance and a series of fascinating documents delivered by helpful and encouraging genealogical staff along the way. “I thought there was nobody exotic in my family, ever. I was so wrong,” says a moved Colman, overlooking the fact she’s great company.

The Unicorn, Wednesday, 7.30pm, Ten and WIN Network

Among the ranks of contemporary American character actors, few have had as distinctive a career as that of immediately recognisable 47-year old, Alabama-born Walton Goggins. Onscreen regularly since the early 1990s, his numerous, mostly sinister roles include reckless detective Shane Vendrell in The Shield, and morally opaque career criminal Boyd Crowder in Justified for television, and in Quentin Tarantino films Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. The New York Times once observed Goggins “made a habit of being the best thing about the … shows he’s in”, which augurs well for the new half-hour situation comedy The Unicorn. He plays good-natured father of two Wade Felton, who reluctantly begins dating again, a year after the death of his wife, at the urging of his best friends. Co-creators Bill Martin and Mike Schiff (Third Rock from the Sun, Grounded for Life) based the show on the life of acquaintance Grady Cooper, and got to the unlikely but perfect choice of Goggins through mutual friends. Unusually smart for a sitcom, this Unicorn feels real.

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Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, series 3.

Royal treat for viewers

“The Crown doesn’t put on a show,” says Olivia Colman, who takes over from Claire Foy as the Queen as the series reaches the mid-1960s in a triumphant 10-part third season premiering on Netflix. Colman’s Elizabeth may be speaking of the royal we and a reticence to get involved with issues of the day but, as conceived and primarily written by Peter Morgan and sumptuously mounted by Left Bank Pictures and parent site Sony Pictures Entertainment, this British-American production is every bit the kind of show series television should be. Beautiful to look at, stately yet saucy in its approach and possessing the rare ability to tell a long-form story in easily digestible and almost stand-alone hours for non-royalists yet offering a binge-watching delight for the faithful, The Crown remains television royalty.

Though it was considered a gamble at the time, Morgan’s concept of recasting the roles of the royal family members as the show progressed has, at least initially, paid great dividends. A reminder of this is a scene where the Queen is inspecting now-and-then portraits for updated stamps, with the first looking like Foy and the second a more updated version to reflect Colman.

In addition to the most recent Oscar winner — who, remember, won that award (and many others) for playing Queen Anne in last year’s black comedy The Favourite (for more on the actress and her search for family, see free-to-air) — Tobias Menzies (Outlander, Game of Thrones) takes over from Matt Smith as Prince Philip, while Helena Bonham Carter neatly yet organically steals nearly every scene she’s in as Vanessa Kirby’s successor in the role of the deeply conflicted and dissatisfied Princess Margaret.

So even is the keel on which this new trio guides the ship of state that readers of interviews with the two sets of actors can well believe that the hand-off between seasons was enthusiastically embraced by the talent for the greater good of the work at large. You want to believe that egos have been left at the door; it’s that kind of show.

Set between 1964 and 1977, the events of the season coincide with the era of British prime minister Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins), the working-class Labour politician who is shown as developing an unexpectedly friendly and even warm, if they are the right words, relationship with the rigorously distant Queen.

Strong out of the gate in the first episodes, this season wisely moves outside the palace, though it remains, as it must, chronological in its viewing of history.

Episode two, Margaretology, features an increasingly raucous social encounter between Princess Margaret and US president Lyndon Johnson (improbably but perfectly played by established character actor Clancy Brown, who for the past two decades has been the voice of Mr Krabs on the animated show SpongeBob SquarePants) that ends with an extremely obscene but admittedly clever dirty limerick at which they both howl.

Funny as that is, the next hour, Aberfan, goes in the opposite direction with its visceral, superbly edited and narratively respectful re-creation of the 1966 Welsh coalmine disaster and the Queen’s muted and somewhat tone-deaf response to it, calling up the memory of the Queen’s public reaction to the death of Princess Diana three decades later. Similarly, Wilson’s unlikely and increasingly warm stewardship with the rigorously distant Queen is reminiscent of her subsequent relationship with his successor, Tony Blair.

Further developments await, best left unrevealed. “She is,” Colman has said of the Queen, “the most extraordinary human being.” And The Crown, commandingly and compellingly, continues to be a most extraordinary TV event.

The Crown, streaming on Netflix.

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Pay TV Bites

Yellowstone, Streaming on Stan

Kevin Costner is starring in his first long-form television project since Hatfields & McCoys in 2012, and it is solid, sweeping, picturesque entertainment. Yellowstone was created by actor-turned-writer-director Taylor Sheridan, who was the honest cop on Sons of Anarchy, and follows his award-winning scripts for the big-screen dramas Sicario, Hell and High Water and Wind River (the last of which he directed). Costner is a comfortable fit as John Dutton, the taciturn patriarch of the eponymous Montana ranch that seems constantly under pressure from without and within: deep-pocketed land developer Dan Jenkins (Danny Huston) wants to shave off bits of land for housing and Native American Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) is determined to reclaim it for his reservation, while son Kayce (Luke Grimes) is raising a family on that reservation and daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly) is a financier and closet addict. The show, which trails only The Walking Dead in basic cable popularity stateside, is now in its second season with a third on the way. This is a smartly melodramatic show that uses Costner’s gravitas as well as Sheridan’s good story sense and focused direction to reward bingeing.

The Sopranos, Saturday, 10am, Box Sets

As the history of cable and now streaming TV continues to be written, the dark organised crime drama The Sopranos, which ran from 1999 to 2007, seems to top or at least finish in the top three influential series of the past two decades (The Wire and Breaking Bad usually hover around it). Now, for those who missed all or large chunks of it, Foxtel channel Box Sets is showing the series beginning November 16 at 10am and concluding November 23. The late James Gandolfini wasn’t even remotely the first choice to play Tony Soprano, the New Jersey made man who juggled his criminal activities under the guise of “waste management” with a complicated family life. Yet it is his intensity in a role about which the actor was deeply conflicted that anchors the power and resonance of the stories. Gandolfini’s son, Michael, will play the younger mobster in the upcoming sequel The Many Saints of Newark from creator David Chase, which is reason enough to watch all or part of The Sopranos again.

Dickinson, Streaming on Apple TV+

“You are such a weirdo,” spurned suitor George Gould (Samuel Farnsworth) tells young poet Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) early in the first episode of Apple TV+’s new darkly comic streaming series Dickinson, and he might well be speaking for the show itself. Set in 1850s Amherst, Massachusetts (it was shot in New York State and at Brooklyn studio sets), the series as conceived by creator Alena Smith unapologetically positions Dickinson as a rebellious Gen Z teenager, the young people around her as tuned-in contemporaries and her parents (Toby Huss and Jane Krakowski) as adults firmly stuck in the past. Unsurprisingly, Dickinson has been garnering rave reviews from younger-skewing press who embrace the show’s unorthodox tonal approach and casting of rapper-actor Wiz Khalifa as the recurring character of Death. The most incendiary wrinkle in the show is Dickinson’s fervent love for her best friend and future sister-in-law Sue Gilbert (Ella Hunt); historians agree they had a warm relationship, but its physicality early on here is a point contested by most scholars. Still, this is the most audacious of Apple’s offerings.