In mid-January, the critic Noel Murray wrote a perceptive and important essay for The AV Club about how much depictions of both nerds and people with autism have improved in popular culture in recent years. He explained that:

Five years ago, when my son turned 6, I wrote an essay for this site called “Rain Man Revisited,” in which I lamented that movies and TV episodes about autism tend to treat the autistic as aliens in our midst, defined only by their family members, who spend their lives waiting for their autists to say “I love you.” The situation has vastly improved since then, even beyond Sheldon Cooper. The HBO movie Temple Grandin did justice to an icon in the autism community, showing Grandin as a complicated person with accomplishments and pleasures as well as limitations. Community, The Middle, and Parenthood have created distinctive ASD characters in the pop-culture-consumed Abed Nadir, the obsessive-compulsive bookworm Brick Heck, and the inadvertently insensitive Max Braverman. And Ryan Cartwright’s performance as the autistic superhero Gary Bell on Alphas has been one of the truest I’ve yet seen, accurate in the autist’s at-times-frustrating inability to control his own quirks while also allowing Gary to be amused and amusing on his own terms.

In the weeks since Murray published his essay, I rewatched Freaks and Geeks, Paul Feig’s genius single-season show about the students at a suburban high school near Detroit, and Undeclared, collaborator Judd Apatow’s show about college freshmen living on the same hall. And while I was struck by any number of things in both shows, part of what stood out for me was the depictions of nerds. There’s no question that the geeks on both shows face any number of social challenges, from bullying, to building friendships with women they find attractive, to communicating sincerity when their default mode is sarcasm, to determining the status of a relationship after you’ve slept with someone once. But they’re decidedly not autistic: in fact, many of their problems stem from a mismatch between the geeks’ strong emotions, sincerity, and desires to connect and the environments in which they operate, which tend to overvalue coolness, detachment, and irony. It was a set of depictions that made me wonder if the depictions of nerds and autists have improved because we’re over-conflating geekiness and the presence of characters somewhere on the autism spectrum, rather than reflecting the range of both nerds and people with autism.

One of the best creations of Freaks and Geeks is Harris Trinsky, a long-haired nerd played by Stephen Lea Sheppard who, incidentally, has his only other acting credit Dudley Heinsbergen, the character in The Royal Tenenbaums who is being studied by Bill Murray’s Raleigh, who describes Dudley as suffering “from a rare disorder combining symptoms of amnesia, dyslexia, and color-blindness, with a highly acute sense of hearing.” Harris unmistakably geeky—the Dungeon Master of his social circle’s Dungeons and Dragons games, a good student, slack-physiqued in a way that suggests he isn’t trying to assimilate by bulking up or going out for sports—yet he’s also something of a sage. He advises Sam Weir, Neal Schweiber, and Bill Haverchuck to fight their bully, Alan White. He has a girlfriend, Judith, who he gets “scented oils and plenty of time with her man,” though they don’t appear to be having sex. Chief Freak Daniel Desario comes to Harris for an assessment on whether or not he’s a loser, and Harris calmly tells him “You’re not a loser ’cause you have sex, but if you weren’t having sex, we could definitely debate the issue.” When Coach Fredericks institutes a requirement that students shower after gym class, Harris is the one of the geeks who reacts with utter calm—he’s not ashamed or anxious of his body. Harris is very, very different from his contemporaries, but he’s not made uncomfortable the ways in which he’s socially out of step. Instead, Harris is comfortably and confidently marching to the beat of his own drummer.

The question for the rest of the geeks—and even for some of the freaks—is whether they’ll end up deciding that the tune Harris identified earlier than the rest of them is a fit, or whether they’ll end up socially assimilating in other ways. Sam, as his friendship and experience dating Cindy Sanders suggests, may have more capacity than Harris does to socially assimilate. The most conventionally handsome of his friends, once Sam hits his growth spurt and develops some fashion sense that doesn’t involve powder-blue jumpsuits, he may face even more intense questions about which social groups he wants to be a part of, rather than finding happiness in the group that will have him. Sensitive Bill may not grow into those options, but his bluntness has its appeal for popular students who are also going through the process of finding out that the social group where they initially landed may not be the one where they’d prefer to end up, as was clear in the episode where he and the other geeks attend a makeout party, and his seven minutes in heaven with a cheerleader turns into something more sincere and extended.
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I know. There aren’t a lot of competitors for the mantle. But I’ve been catching up on SyFy’s Alphas, a show about people with remarkable abilities, the people who want to exploit them, and those in their number who want to declare independence from humanity, and I’m increasingly impressed by its political savvy. While at first blush, Alphas might seem like a rip-off of X-Men, it’s turning into a deeply thoughtful meditation on extremism, equality, and the profound difficulty of achieving political consensus.

Many science fiction or fantasy franchises have a range of villains who stand in for a series of big ideas, like Magneto’s representation of mutant superiority in the X-Men, or the Lizard’s advocacy of evolution beyond humanity in Spider-Man. Alphas has one big question—how people with abilities can live in a world where they are a minority—and a lot of people who believe they have the correct answer to it.

Dr. Rosen believes that integration, including channeling his charges’ abilities in service of law enforcement and helping them manage the manifestation of their abilities so they don’t do damage or make other people uncomfortable, is the best way to go. Red Flag, the terrorist organization the advocates for Alpha dominance, isn’t a monolithic organization. The first member of it we meet, Anna, an autistic woman with the ability to translate languages and invent them, believes that Red Flag is necessary as a way to force a truce with normal humanity. If humans had their way, she believes, they’d prevent people like her from being born, both because they’d see her autism as a defect, and because they find her gifts threatening. Later, Brent Spiner played Dr. Kern, an Alpha who went a step further, sowing active DNA in prenatal vitamins in the hope his experiments on non-consenting women would result in the birth of more of the people he sees as a miraculous improvement on humanity’s base state. And lately, the show’s been spending time with Stanton Parish, an apparently unkillable Alpha who’s murdered more moderate members of Red Flag.

It’s a fascinating approach, turning a villain-of-the-week formula into a more deeply nuanced exploration of a question that deserves that kind of sustained interrogation. Gary, an autistic member of the core team, complained in an episode in the first season “Why do we always have to fight people with abilities? It’s annoying.” It’s a question that almost anyone who cares about politics has asked themselves at some point, wishing it was easier to get it together to win an election or a legislative vote. But the answer is that the big questions aren’t resolvable quickly or easily. It takes time to reach a consensus, and even then, there will likely remain people outside of it. Alphas is the rare science fiction program smart enough to understand that, and it’s making for fascinating television.

After watching Alphas on SyFy last night, I feel like it’s a show that makes a lot of sense to watch alongside Misfits. They’re both shows about people with powers that are as inconvenient as they are helpful. And as Rowan Kaiser pointed out yesterday, Misfits is a show that reverses the polarity on traditional heroes and villains, because in the absence of people who will believe in the main characters’ powers, they seem dangerous and crazy. Alphas is the reverse of that, a show about people with superpowers that would be disastrous if they weren’t managed and protected by someone who can advocate for them within conventional heirarchies. Without someone to mediate between the human and the superpowered world, both shows suggest that things could get ugly, Misfits by showing that reality, Alphas by suggesting it.

Whereas the kids from Misfits face off with probation workers with good intentions and frightening levels of committment, the characters on Alphas are watched over by David Strathairn as Dr. Lee Rosen, a kindly psychiatrist and neurologist who mediates between his charges, swims a lot, eats “Asian pennywort. It increases the blood flow of oxygen to the brain,” and speculates about the skiffle origins of his favorite musicians. Both shows get that superpowers may interfere with characters’ abilities to function in the real world: Alisha on Misfits might not be able to have a regular sex life, Rachel on Alphas has parents who assume she’s unmarriageable because of her sensitivities (though they don’t know she knows they think that), and Alphas‘ Gary clearly is somewhere on the autism spectrum. And both shows get that superpowers make for an awfully tetchy group environment. On Alphas, Rosen is an escape valve for that pressure. In the five episodes of Misfits I’ve seen so far, it’s not so clear that the group will be able to stand together.

I tend to think that these kinds of shows in conjunction with efforts like FX’s adaptation of Powers, and things like the rise of the human characters in S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Marvel movies, we’re reaching the second phase of superhero stories beyond the pages of comic books. The first was about how superheroes learn to live with themselves once they’ve attained great power or, in the case of Batman and Thor, taken on great quests. The second is how the rest of us learn to live with them in a society profoundly altered by their presence.