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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So, Tim Kring started out the panel for Touch, his new autistic-people-are-magic show starring Keifer Sutherland as a 9/11 widower by informing us that Sutherland’s character’s son, a white American child, is “the most disenfranchised person on the planet. He’s small, he’s unable to communicate, to make his point known.” Given that, it wasn’t exactly shocking that Kring ended up presenting himself essentially as the Evan Bayh of Hollywood. Rather than lamenting partisanship in Washington, Kring’s come up with something he calls “social benefit storytelling,” which turns out to be a plan to change the world with warm, fuzzy television that avoids actually discussing what it means to have an autistic child.

To be fair, Kring told me that “he show…is really just about putting this message out into the world and trying to create stories that uplift people through this theme of interconnectivity. In terms of actually calling attention to various things, it is a show that aspires to do that, and I would love to have some of the stories we tackle call attention to various issues around the world and use the power of storytelling to create some positive change out there.” And he did cite the idea “that people tens of thousands of mile away would fly planes into this building is a result of our globally connected world.” So I really do hope that if this is going to be a butterfly effect show, it will be one that actually suggests that there are consequences for American policy at home and abroad.

But I’m really turned off by the idea that positive energy is the basis for our failures to connect. There’s nothing wrong with wanted to set a civil tone or approach other people with a spirit of openness, and after 24, I do think it’s good that Keifer Sutherland wants to be involved in a project that preaches those values. But there are structural factors that influence why people are unable to connect with each other and to be civil to each other. You see this in movies like A Better Life—poverty means you can’t be generous, that you don’t have time to build the family life that you want. It’s the reason the broadband gap matters: if you can’t get online, you don’t have access to what Kring called “the emerging story of our time is that we’re more connected to each other than we ever thought or knew, and I think it’s being born out by the whole social networking world that we’re living in.” There’s something odd about wanting to tell stories about the things that keep us from talking each other but starting that show out by inventing a magical alternative to autism.