It’s difficult to tell whether or not this is intentional. Indeed, the viewer grows to hate both parents’ weaknesses and foibles, their obvious mistakes and character flaws. If they do come around to appreciating Joe, it’s a shaky little moment of personal crisis, in the last few minutes of an often tedious six-hour journey. And though there is an understandable and human story there, it is a bit off-putting to watch a show where parents extensively describe their own sense of failure for having a kid with autism - and then never quite come around to some sort of acceptance or appreciation for the child they have.
The show is full of some quite difficult scenes - moments where Alison or Paul desperately try to get Joe to “act normal.” Alison, in particular, is afraid to tell their insular little town about Joe’s disorder, and both struggle with their feelings of inadequacy and sadness. But it fails to connect, either to them or to Joe, and instead becomes cheery window dressing that distracts from what the show is really good at doing.Īnd, arguably, the show fails at what it is really trying to do, which is to bring the audience into the shame, frustration and despair that Paul and especially Alison feel towards their child with special needs.
The backstory and context is there to try to demonstrate where parents Paul and Alison are coming from with their struggles over Joe. There’s the widowed music teacher who wants a casual relationship and the Polish woman with vague visa status. There’s a gastropub project and a local doctor’s office, a cute boy at school and a brewery to run.
Along with the at times far-too-detailed family bickering (something something adultery, something something business), the family welcomes in, and is a part of, all sorts of small-town drama. His moments with older sister Rebecca (Molly Wright) are especially touching, as she is both increasingly ignored by her stressed-out parents and is also one of the few people who has a real and heartfelt relationship with him.īut “The A Word” wants to be about more than just Joe, and that’s where the show declines. Vento is an amazingly believable little actor, capable of both adopting the behaviors of children on the spectrum and of playing those behaviors differently, depending on his scene partner. Though the collection of siblings and in-laws and grandchildren are not quite as funny or dysfunctional as they say they are, they make for a kind of ragged coalition around Joe, each with an identifiably different relationship to him and his disorder.
The couple is embedded in a loudmouthed family dynamic that is probably supposed to be charming, headed by Alison’s father Maurice ( Christopher Eccleston).
Joe’s parents, Paul (Lee Ingleby) and Alison (Morven Christie) don’t even know that Joe is on the spectrum when the series opens.
While the series is about this family learning how to handle the boy’s disorder, “The A Word” also demonstrates a lot of love and appreciation for Joe’s peculiar world. The best thing about SundanceTV’s acquisition of “The A Word,” debuting July 13, is its compassion and curiosity about children on the autism spectrum.