Amazon's As We See It does something a "jillion" dramedies have done before, but in this context it's radical

The New York Times

"The word 'normal' comes up a lot in As We See It," says James Poniewozik of the Amazon dramedy from Jason Katims adapted from the Israeli series On the Spectrum. "It’s a goal, a dream and, maybe, a myth. The beauty of this comedy-drama is that it neither downplays the characters’ difference nor romanticizes it. Instead, it simply lets them be people — funny, passionate, sometimes frustrating — which helps the first season....create a vibrant world in eight short episodes. Violet (Sue Ann Pien), intense and hungry to live, is fixated on finding a boyfriend, the key to a vision of a 'normal' life that is heavily influenced by lifestyle magazines and Instagram. Jack (Rick Glassman) is a gifted computer programmer unable to keep himself from calling his co-workers idiots. And Harrison (Albert Rutecki) has a crippling fear of venturing out in public. In the opening scene, the trio’s aide, Mandy (Sosie Bacon), talks him through a walk down the street via his phone earbuds, like mission control guiding a spacewalk. It’s a succinct introduction to his world, where a jaunt to the coffee shop is a gantlet of dogs, noisy trucks and skateboarders, each a potentially derailing stimulus. Jason Katims, who adapted the series from the Israeli show On the Spectrum (streaming on HBO Max), brings personal and professional experience to the project. He has a son on the autism spectrum, a subject he explored in a story line in his NBC drama Parenthood. Series like Community, The Big Bang Theory and Bones have had characters who were coded as being on the spectrum but never overtly confirmed to be. More recent programs like Atypical and Everything’s Gonna Be Okay have featured explicitly autistic characters. In As We See It, Katims centers a range of neurodiverse characters and casts neurodiverse actors to play them. Whether from craft or authenticity or both, their performances are rich, funny and vibrant. The characters’ charm, and sometimes their conflict, comes partly from their willingness to express what’s on their minds — be it Violet’s thirst for love or Jack’s impatience — and their difficulty in filtering it."

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• As We See It's portrayal of autism is dated, despite its strong cast: "Amazon Prime Video’s drama is a show with good intentions," says Kristen Lopez. "Creator Jason Katims has a son with Asperger’s, which also influenced the writer and producer’s NBC series Parenthood, and his latest series has cast a trio of performers who identify as on the spectrum. The problem lies within the notion of 'caretaker entertainment,' which seeks to balance the viewpoints of those living with autism and those bearing only a spectator’s knowledge of it. Also unsettling: Though there were writers with autism in the writers’ room, one is credited throughout the eight episodes; none of the directors identified as being on the spectrum. Both the production choices and on-screen results present a show that cops out of its own title. As We See It is about perception, which means the caretakers’ opinions are valued equally with Violet, Jack, and Harrison’s, yet the series seems to at least lean on the side of those who are neurotypical. The titular 'We' may not be who you think. (Sosie) Bacon’s Mandy and Chris Pang’s Van, Violet’s brother, are given social lives outside of the apartment focused on their professional and personal goals. Van, in his case, spends a significant amount of time discussing how Violet ruins his relationships and generally chastising those who would seek to help Violet be her own woman. And nearly every episode ends with Mandy making decisions about her life outside of what she’s doing with the trio. In some instances, their opinions are wrong and fall back on tropes that haven’t just plagued portrayals of autism, but disability in general. Van couches his concern for Violet as fear that she’s a target for violence. Violet uses Bumble on her phone, goes on bad dates, and falls into a situation with a guy who treats her poorly. Van sees these as proof she needs to be “protected,” yet these are issues that women face daily. At one point, Violet is given a morning-after pill with no scene of her assessing the situation, just wordlessly taking the pill in a moment that feels scummy as can be."
• As We See It continues Jason Katims' tearjerker tradition: "Jason Katims is an impresario of earnestness, and the weapons he uses to wring a tear are well-established," says Roxana Hadadi. "Characters yearning for connection — friendship, love, acceptance — are placed in enclosed communities with their own sets of rules and rituals. Handheld camerawork, with the lens placed alongside, behind, and quite close to people’s faces, long takes, and minimal cuts provide an immersive kind of intimacy. Being alive is hard work, and changing ourselves might be even harder. Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and About a Boy were all variations on a certain template of longing, and his latest, As We See It, continues that bittersweet tradition. During the course of the first season’s eight episodes, all of which are available for streaming on Prime Video today, three 25-year-olds who have been friends since preschool live together in a California apartment. They feel unfulfilled by their jobs and slightly jealous of the lives their peers show off on Instagram. They go on bad dates, and they try to make new friends. They drink, they do drugs, and they watch porn. And they are all living on the autism spectrum, with various manifestations of their neurodivergence." Hadadi adds: "The series makes messy personal-professional boundaries a narrative go-to, but the ensemble’s distinct performances help to differentiate those story lines. And perhaps there is deliberation here in crafting similar narratives for the core three characters but then making their reactions so different — a subtextual way of arguing against the assumption that there is one recognizable quality of neurodivergence, one way people on the spectrum should react to things or one way to be a person with autism."
• Nobody illustrates the precariousness of sentimental TV better than Jason Katims, perhaps because nobody does it better: "When Katims is on his game — Friday Night Lights, Parenthood — the veteran of the Edward Zwick/Marshall Herskovitz school makes shows that earn every laugh and every jerked tear. When Katims is off — Fox’s dismal Almost Family, the first half of the short-lived Rise on NBC — the results can be excruciating," says Daniel Fienberg. "After recent detours — Almost Family still makes me angry — Katims is back on solid footing with his new Amazon half-hour As We See It, based on the Israeli format. Likely to be called a 'comedy' by virtue of its half-hour running time, As We See It generates more smiles of recognition than guffaws and probably more tears as well. It’s a fundamentally big-hearted show that easily weathers some early narrative clunkiness and, by the end of its eight-episode first season, is pushing a variety of emotional buttons with confidence."
• As We See It gently and smartly suggests that Jack, Violet, and Harrison’s lives, and their problems, are just as normal and messy as everyone else’s: That's "even as they’re just as unique as any other human being is from one another," says Alan Sepinwall. "Be prepared for a lot of difficult — or, at times, merely stressful — moments, as dates, friendships, and professional opportunities can and do go awry constantly, often for reasons our heroes don’t quite understand even as they’re happening," he adds. "(Violet’s fumbling quest for love — or at least sex — tended to give me the most sympathy anxiety, but you may find yourself squirming more at the travails of Harrison and/or Jack.) These scenes are not always easy to sit through, but they never feel gratuitous or mean. And Glassman, Pien, and Rutecki play them openly and honestly, so that it’s easier to understand the pain and confusion when things inevitably don’t go as easily for their characters as they would expect. This, in turn, makes the moments where things do work out — whether for them as individuals or as an unlikely group of friends — ringer louder and more satisfyingly than if it were smooth sailing until those points. (Have tissues handy for a sequence in the seventh episode involving Barbra Streisand’s 'The Way We Were' — even though the scene is about one character’s difficulty crying.)"
• As We See It uniquely explores what it truly means to move through the world in a way that is often looked down upon or misunderstood: "Though the series sometimes shows characters like Violet’s brother or her caregiver, Mandy (Sosie Bacon), struggle with the neurodivergent characters, it never centers their frustrations," says Elly Belle. "Instead, As We See It approaches the stories from the double empathy framework: Autistic people shouldn’t be burdened with having to conform to be more 'normal' in a world that hates people who are different. It’s non-autistic people’s responsibility to understand and learn to live alongside autistic people. Because no time is wasted purposely infantilizing its main characters, their best qualities and strengths are excavated like fossils."
• As We See It possesses the bittersweet tone of an indie movie, unfolding in eight half-hour chapters: "The performances are understated and natural, and the situations occasionally uncomfortable, with Violet learning the hard way that her work 'friends' aren't necessarily people upon whom she can rely," says Brian Lowry. "The balancing act for this sort of concept hinges on making these characters seem real without condescending to them, a line that Katims and company walk with considerable sensitivity. It's worth noting that the show also follows others that have explored autism, including Netflix's Atypical (a soapier construct) and its reality-dating acquisition from Down Under Love on the Spectrum."
• It’s the acting that makes it so easy to fall into the show, and feel such sharp pangs of sympathy for its vulnerable characters: "There’s not a whole lot that Glassman, Rutecki, and Pien’s characters have in common beyond their experiences on the spectrum, but each actor embodies them so completely that it hardly matters," says Caroline Framke. "It’s fair to say that by entrusting these stories to actors who know the experiences they’re portraying, As We See It succeeds where too many others have failed."
• As We See It is a layered relationship dramedy that Katims and his writing staff navigate brilliantly: "It does not condescend to its characters, who are more than their ASD," says Dustin Rowles. "As the title suggests, it provides their perspective. They want to be thought of as “normal.” They fall in love; they worry about their futures; and they bruise, sometimes more easily than we do because they have been protected for most of their lives. But it’s also about their parents, siblings, and caretakers who have to learn to let go and put a little faith in their grown children to take care of themselves and a lot of faith in the rest of the world to treat them with kindness. It is a show with a huge heart — not unlike Katims’ Friday Night Lights — but it’s also the kind of honest and unflinching comedy that could only come from someone who has seen and lived it. I hope you’ll give it a chance."
• This is a well-done, soapy drama that has its heart fully on display: "Its warmth is part of a far more complex picture, and this is careful to strike a balance between its more saccharine instincts and what its three leads have to navigate on a daily basis," says Rebecca Nicholson. "Harrison begins to make friends with a young boy living upstairs; the boy’s mother sees this in an understandable, but inaccurate, light. Jack is anxious and blunt with his assessments of certain situations, telling his boss that he believes him to be of inferior intelligence when asked to redo his work. And Violet wants a boyfriend, as she tells Van, in great detail, but her literal-minded approach to finding love leads her into scrape after scrape. The only solace in one episode comes from a robotic vacuum cleaner. It makes the point, again and again, that the world is not always built for people on the autism spectrum, and that sometimes life will be tough. People are often cruel, both deliberately and inadvertently. One of its most important scenes, I think, shows Van losing his patience with his sister, whom he loves very much, berating her for not being 'normal.' He immediately regrets it, of course, but it shows that this is not just pushing a simple idea of what it would take for that situation to change."
• Sue Ann Pien recalls crying after reading the script: "One, I had never seen a character like Violet and, two, I knew exactly who she was; it was like Jason wrote that part for me,” says Pien, who like her fellow leads Rick Glassman and Albert Rutecki is on the spectrum herself. “There were just so many parallels between us: being young and trying so hard, feeling like I wanted to be like everyone else.” Katims adds: "Sue Ann has a killer combination as an actress of being both fiercely intelligent and completely in touch with her emotional world. Honestly, I’m in awe of her. She never utters a false note as an actress — it all just comes from some deep, true place inside of her. She is also an absolute delight to work with. Her boundless energy and joy of life is contagious and has been a big contributor to what has made this such a joyous set.”
• Jason Katims started developing As We See It years ago after thinking what his son would be like as an adult: “There’s a lot that is written about children with autism, but the idea of adults with autism is less explored,” says Katims, whose 23-year-old son, Sawyer, is on the autism spectrum. “And so I was just there; it was something that I was thinking about in my life, and wondering about, and maybe losing a little sleep about.” Katims then watched the Israeli series On the Spectrum. “I watched them the moment I got them and I just felt strongly that this is the show I want to do,” he says. “There’s the old adage to write what you know, right? I had a professor in college who said: Write what you’re learning about. This was a subject matter that I felt, on one hand, I knew a lot about; I felt that I could do it justice. But on the other hand, it was something I was learning about and am learning about. And so it felt like the right thing for me to do.”
• Katims recalls his son Sawyer not being into his shows: "When it came to Parenthood, and the character of Max Braverman was publicly modeled partially on him, I thought how could he not want to see this? He very much did not," says Katims. "When I pressed him, he explained to me that he wasn’t into 'those kind of shows' and reminded me he wasn’t alone, citing my less than stellar Nielsen ratings. 'Well, what kind of shows are you into?' I asked. Exasperated, he listed a few: Shark Tank, Cops, Bar Rescue. 'You know, good shows,' he explained...But when I started working on the show that would eventually become As We See It, I realized there is no show I’ve done that I would want him to see more than this one. It is about three 25-year-old young adults on the autistic spectrum trying to figure out their lives. It is literally speaking to his moment. The leads, authentically performed by brilliant actors on the spectrum, are pitch perfect. They ooze charm and honesty. They say exactly what is on their mind, at times resulting in the kind of irreverent humor that I know would make Sawyer smile. The characters deal with everything Sawyer and everyone deals with this at this age — love, loss, friendship, jobs — but they do it through the lens of being on the spectrum. Plus, it’s on a streamer, not broadcast, so the characters can drop f-bombs to their heart’s content. A huge plus for Sawyer. I think it could be such a meaningful experience for Sawyer to see a show that that reflects where he is right now in his life. And yes, my ego is at play here. I would give anything to have what I do be acknowledged by my son."