Reality Dating as Fine Art
By: Rob Healy
Tags: Love On The Spectrum, Television, Autism, Netflix, Dating

Why “Love on the Spectrum” is the Best Show of 2020

We’re 5 months into COVID, the Hollywood content production pipeline has run dry, and my Netflix cue has turned into a toggle between documentary esoterica and early-aught sitcom reruns. I’m Jack Sparrow lamenting that the rum is gone every time the now Pavlovian scarlet lettered N “dun-dun’s” on my TV screen.

And so it’s a rare surprise during the COVID era when you come across a show that genuinely stops you in your tracks. Even rarer when that show is a reality show. Rarer still when it’s a reality dating show. And yet, here I lay surrounded by a graveyard of my own tear-soaked tissues at 2 AM, confident I‘ve just watched the best television of 2020.

TRAILER HERE

The show is called Love on the Spectrum. It follows the lives of 7 individuals all looking for love, going on first dates, learning how to date, etc. The twist; the individuals all happen to be on the Autism Spectrum. The stakes of the show are summed up neatly by 25-year-old Olivia who casually mentions that she doesn’t expect to find love simply because of the odds - 95% of people with ASD end up romantically alone. A dating show with a 95% chance of failure. But that's the point.

Olivia

What I want to do in this essay is more than just give a nice review of the show. I want to put forward a small argument for why I consider LOTS to be one of the most contemplative and artistic shows of the past few years as well as offer a small neuroscientific primer for how to maybe go about watching the show for those who haven't seen it yet.

Before I do that though, serious credit must be given to the show’s creator Cian O’Clery. O’Clery’s editorial touch throughout is considered and empathetic. He never tries to push his characters beyond the reality in which they live or use their disability as vessels for drama. Neither are there any traces of exploitative emotion porn, voyeurism, or sensationalism that typically plague shows about people with disabilities. He neither portrays his subjects as empathetic heroes or pitied victims and instead just treats them as slightly disabled adults trying their best to figure out a complicated world.

Where Cian and his team perhaps deserve even more credit though is for having the foresight to see what is now so obvious in retrospect; those on the autism spectrum are as about as compelling of documentary subjects as one could find.

If you have ever had the pleasure of befriending someone on the spectrum, one thing immediately stands out - their candor. Their unflappable honesty. For better or worse. And so the genius of the show is to put these beacons of honesty into one of the most “dishonest” social concoctions the modern world has devised — first dates.

Love on the Spectrum then, as an art piece, functions as a sort of distorted mirror. A warped reflection of how we sometimes disingenuously act when in the process of trying to find love. The honesty of its characters reflecting back on us the hollowness of the performances and plays we often put on for each other, especially when it comes to courtship. The acting and performing we do, layered with innuendo, subtext, and inverted meaning. All tools that are difficult for those on the spectrum to wield gracefully.

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Without explicitly trying to, the show deconstructs dating into two distinct components — Scripting and Chemistry. The former consisting of those phrases and prompts we use on first dates to build rapport with another person: You meet. You greet. You introduce. You ask questions. You share about yourself. Eye contact. Body posture. Showing interest etc. Running through these protocols as a way of laying the groundwork so that romantic chemistry can hopefully emerge down the road.

The show’s conceit is centered around the idea that somewhere between the scripting and the chemistry is where flirting is supposed to take place. The connective glue that bridges the gap between formal greetings to real romance. What the show’s distorted mirror does is reveal back to the audience “flirting” for what it is — a series of performative lies we employ in service of getting at a deeper truth.

And yet for those with ASD, these performative lies of flirting are incomprehensible and therefore seem entirely unnecessary. The shows distorted mirror asks us then to consider who is being more honest, the show's subjects, or us?

(Great Video Breakdown Here)

If all of this sounds obvious and exactly in line with what you expected from a dating show featuring autistic 20-year-olds, I am failing at my job here. Perhaps it is worth considering just for a moment how convoluted and cryptic those performative lies actually are. Consider for just a moment that to “flirt” is to engage in one of the most socio-linguistically complicated behaviors that humans are capable of. Behaviors that we all too quickly take for granted. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek uses a great example of this to illustrate the sneaky absurdity at play here:

A man and woman are on a first date. The date is going great by any of the conventional measures that one might use to define a first date “going great”. He then walks her back to her apartment at the end of the night, neither of them wanting the date to end but both knowing that it would be improper or too forward to suggest the obvious, “Should we have sex now?”. The woman instead, cleverly drops an outwardly innocent but subtextually loaded question, “Would you like to come up for some tea?”. The man, understanding the subtext, agrees enthusiastically and decides to build on the romantic tension by adding, “There is just one problem. I don’t drink tea.” The woman recognizes he is being coy and hip to her advances and so she proceeds to increase the sexual tension even further by responding, “That’s ok. I don’t have any tea.” They both then walk into the apartment together and the viewer is left to assume that passionate kissing and lovemaking ensues.

Zizek refers to this as the addition of negation. You take away the literal context and you are left with so much more than just the “tea”. The innuendo and hidden meanings that are being smuggled underneath their exchange are, in fact, the entirety of the exchange. The sentences the man and woman are saying to each other are just placeholders for something much larger and sophisticated taking place beneath the surface.

Where the rub is, or rather where the mystery lies, is how most of us can intuitively comprehend the couple’s entire exchange but are at a loss when it comes to actually explaining it. Unwrapping what is happening with respect to language and semantics and the unspoken in that short dialogue that took place.

Again, the distorted mirror comes back into play. While at first you might be inclined to pity the show's subjects for failing to grasp something so intuitively obvious, it quickly dawns upon you how little you actually understand of the Scripting vs Chemistry paradigm yourself. How bumblingly ignorant you would sound if someone asked you to break it all down for them in a systematic and logical way.

And so Love on the Spectrum offers us a glimpse of what it would be like if our brain’s natural default were unable to translate these flirting scripts. It shows us what it would be like to have to learn these scripts like one would learn an alien language. And then, once having learned the alien language, the show asks us to consider what it would be like to only understand that language in its most literal instantiations.

Once you throw in the typical nervousness and uncertainty that comes with having never been kissed, never having had your hand held, and never sleeping with anyone, you can’t help but be taken in by Spectrum’s charms and dramas. Watching with a removed eye is to at times feel like you are in the middle of some dystopian, rom-com-sci-fi movie, with a side of Christopher Guest. Which I guess is to say, the show is a genre unto itself.

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Kelvin gets ready for his date

Some of the most emotionally resonant moments of the show are the direct and oftentimes jarring Script vs Chemistry disconnects that happen when the subject is aware they are happening but struggling to course-correct. All of this best explored through an Autism dating coach named Jodie (who herself is worthy of her own reality series.)

When Jodie helps Kelvin, a Japanese boy living with his father (arguably the most verbally “afflicted” of all the show’s characters), she asks him what he might say if his date mentions to him that she is interested in animals. Kelvin thinks for a second and then responds, “Would you like to go to the Koala Park?” Jodie congratulates Kelvin and lets him know she thinks that's a great response.

Come the night of Kelvin’s date at a local Hibachi grill, it becomes clear that his date has no interest in doing the scripted back and forths that Kelvin has so tiresomely rehearsed with Jodie. Instead, she suggests (in the first 30 seconds of arrival) that they play some Nintendo Switch that she brought in her purse. This throws Kelvin because she has gone off-script in the exact way that Jodie suggested Kelvin not do on his date. The ensuing minutes are reminiscent of an actor in a play who has forgotten his lies. Standing there, struggling to “improvise”, waiting for someone to come save him.

Kelvin then steadies himself to try and get back on script and asks his date if she likes animals. She responds that she finds them “alright” and continues playing her Nintendo Switch. Kelvin, remembering Jodie’s suggestion, then asks if she would like to go to the Koala Park with him sometime to which his date nonchalantly muses that it “might be nice” and quickly moves on to something else.

This scene is painful to watch. You are seeing Kelvin in real-time desperately trying to compute what just went wrong. He was led to believe that his Koala script would help move the date toward a place of “chemistry” only for it to have had the opposite effect.

What is so revealing about this scene is how nakedly it exposes our desire as audience members to watch a “come up for tea” story unfold. It bares naked how indifferent we actually are about the precise words being exchanged when we read a romance novel or watch a movie. Instead, what we really care about is the subtext between the lines. The meaning underneath the words. We desperately want to see the hidden game revealed. Everything else is just window dressing.

But LOTS never gives us the satisfaction. Instead, we sit front row watching two tennis players both serving simultaneously, unable to see the other’s ball while desperately trying to get the other to return theirs.

It’s these sorts of “through-the-looking” glass moments at nearly every turn that elevate the show from great television to true art. Every vignette serving as a Russian Nesting Doll of blank-slatism, linguistics, semiotics, cultural constructs (both sticky and flexible), neurodiversity, theory of mind, all the way down to the ethics and legal ramifications of ASD people having sex with each other.

Kelvin and his date

Equally as compelling are the subject’s parents. Acting as ciphers or “normalcy” portals for their children. I.e. “Here is what Mark means when he says or does this.” or “Chloe has come so far from where she was at 10 years ago.” They let the audience know its ok to laugh when 25-year-old Michael stares straight into their faces and mordantly warns everyone at the dinner table that younger girls often only want boyfriends so they can have “…intercourse, a bodyguard, and a sugar daddy.”

Highlighting the parents and their role in the subjects’ lives provides a small insight into how much commitment and devotion and day-in-day-out selfless love are required to parent a child with Autism. A constant struggle. An endless resetting and calibrating of expectations. Disappointments. Small Victories. Isolation. Nights spent worrying their child will be all alone after they die. Desperately wanting them to find someone to grow old and share a life with. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, LOTS is almost as much about familial love as it is about romantic love. It’s as much about the sacrifices we make for those we love, as much as the sacrifices we make to find love.

As to the political and social commentary of the show, it’s another testament to the creators that it’s more of a C or D storyline, but prescient and revealing all the same. The reality that there are just not nearly enough resources or outlets to help those on the spectrum. How poorly the world is set up to accommodate them. How female-presenting autism is traditionally underdiagnosed. How difficult it is to “see” a disability from the outside. How tricky it is for them to navigate a restaurant check or spending a day in public in loud spaces.

The show thankfully never veers into politicking or advocacy. It lets its subjects speak for themselves. Still, one can’t help but notice how stacked the deck is against them from a public dating perspective when simply being in the vicinity of a police siren can cause a nervous episode.

And while Love on the Spectrum’s intellectual depth and tensions are nearly bottomless, it's really the show’s emotional footprint that stays with you long after you’ve left it.

For one, you leave the show with the unflappable sense that its’ subjects are in many ways stronger than the rest of us “neurotypicals”. Most of their dates ending abruptly and jarringly, often with one or both parties wanting the unvarnished truth as to what the other party feels about them and why they think the date maybe didn’t go well. More often than not, the subjects proceed to brush off their rejections better than you or I could ever hope to manage. It’s a compelling and powerful kind of resilience that one can’t help but envy in a way. It’s a stoic sense of “Well, That’s that. On to the next thing.”

This is not to fetishize their disability. Watching LOTS closely is to perform an hourly ritual of emotional cutting. It is as heartbreaking as it is comical as it is surreal. But the twist is that its surreality comes only after you realize that you’re more upset and torn up about the rejection than the actual subjects are. As if to say, “They’ve moved on, so why can’t you?”

Chloe

The second thing you feel emotionally certain of after watching this show is that you just experienced Art as a healing experience. Art as illumination. You leave the show feeling full and uplifted in a way entirely unlike other reality shows.

That’s most likely because it’s often the case that most reality shows leave you feeling slimy and spiritually drained due to the emotional rent-seeking and extraction game being played out by most reality shows. Played out by the “non-acting” actors all too aware that a camera is filming them, by producers all too eager to edit the footage so as to fabricate maximum drama, and by audience members all too willing to let themselves be manipulated by it for the sake of juicy entertainment. Some version of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” which is all fine and well except when the story is presenting itself as a “truthful” account.

Love on the Spectrum is an exception to this reality show maxim precisely because its actors are so allergic to performing for the camera and its producers so reserved in telling you how to feel or what to think about it. What emerges on the other side of that combination is a deep sense of humanity. A feeling of kinship and empathy. Not for people with disabilities per se, but for how hard it is in life just to find a couple of friends or loved ones who you don’t have to act or perform for. The show is a meditation on finding people who love you unconditionally for your heart and not your brain. This is a cheesy aphorism to be sure. But it’s one whose truth is made undeniably self-evident by the show’s end.

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I often flip-flop over what the definition of “good art” is and how we should go about defining it or pointing at it. The academic definitions all too often lack the romantic and emotional sensibility that makes good art worth praising in the first sense. All of this is why David Foster Wallace’s plain-spoken definition, for me, still holds up better than most.

David Foster Wallace

And so this is the best justification I can give for why you should watch Love on the Spectrum. That we currently find ourselves in the middle of “dark times” and the show serves as a desperately needed dose of spiritual CPR.

A kind of CPR that reminds us that, yes life is hard and that invariably there are people out there that have it much harder than you, but those same people are still trying to find ways to live and glow in spite of it.

It’s a CPR that forces us to choose between sitting and lamenting over the dark realities of the world outside or getting up and trying no matter how bleak the odds. A CPR that plainly asks us if we want to be on the side of the removed cynics or we want to be on Team Olivia. Still cynical, still very much aware of the 95% chance of failure ahead of her, and still willing to give it a shot. An echo of Atticus Finch’s powerful line, “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

And lastly, the show is CPR for those of us (yours truly included) who often need reminding of what real courage looks like from real people. Both the show’s subjects and their parents. A reminder that even if you do the right thing, even if you learn all the scripts and follow all the steps, you still can lose. You still can be rejected and disappointed. But to get up every day and just try, to take up arms against pessimism and nihilism and cynicism, even when you know it will probably be a losing fight - this is a type of bravery most of us spend our whole lives running from. Its a kind of courage that most of us can afford to run from.

Love on the Spectrum doesn’t make a dark world magically feel brighter. Rather, it does what all good art should do and shows us how we can be stronger in spite of it. How we can be more alive and human inside of it.