We Need To Talk About Love On The Spectrum
"It's just really gross, because we don’t exist for other people… we exist so that we can exist just like everyone else.”
Love On The Spectrum is everywhere at the moment, but is its view of autistic people actually a bit cooked?
The show was a local sleeper hit when it debuted on the ABC in 2019, but blew up around the world when it hit Netflix in 2020. Since then, there’s been another Australian season, and in the ultimate Antipodean flex went on to be bought by a company in the US and even won three Emmys.
Five years ago, Love On The Spectrum held promise. Could this be the antidote to a reality TV hellscape that included The Bachelor, MAFS and Love Island? What if the love lives of neurodivergent folks were showcased instead? A concept both new and refreshing, its first season left most of its viewers with a spring in its step. Because wasn’t it all so heartwarming?
Autistic writer, comedian and editor of The Chaser John Delmenico has a vastly different view, telling The Offcut that one of the show’s major fuck-ups is an obsession with putting autistic people in neurotypical boxes. In doing so, it fails to ask why neurotypicals can’t better negotiate neurodiversity instead.
“The show is heavily focused on pairing autistic people with other autistic people, which is just not a solution to the societal problems [autistic people have],” he explains. “One of my best friends, her fiancé is neurotypical – and he realised that the onus should be on him to learn what his partner is like and learn about autism and her specific traits.”
Delmenico says that the show’s fixation on pairing autistic people up with each other looks less like neurotypicals’ extending an olive branch to people with autism and more like throwing the olive branch away, in a way that only ghettoises and infantilises.
“Instead of going into that on the show — which would take a little bit more storytelling and taking this topic a bit more seriously — the producers are like, no. Autistic people should just date autistic people. Just keep them over there away from the rest of us where we can just gawk at them and be like, ‘Oh, that’s adorable. They think they’re us’.”
The show’s creators, none of whom have said they’re autistic, very clearly have a preference for a certain type of autistic person, with those who don’t fit a certain mould quickly scrapped from the show’s pool of talent.
Case in point: Kaelynn Partlow. Partlow, who was on the first American season of the show, posted a candid video on TikTok in which she floated some reasons why she wasn’t invited back, and look, none of it presents the production company Northern Pictures in a very good light.
“Here’s what I think – my preferences for dating a neurotypical man were not in alignment with the matches they were trying to create for everyone,” she says on TikTok. “In other words, my preference made finding potential matches more difficult for them and less exciting for viewers,” she says. Her TikTok has amassed 5.5 million viewers to date.
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Kaelynn adds that “passing” for neurotypical probably made her an imperfect candidate for the show, because of its focus on separating autistic people from everyone else. “Since I’m so language-abled, I don’t struggle with communication. People don’t look at me and immediately recognise that I’m autistic.”
On one level, we get it – TV needs to be entertaining in order to find success. We can’t have a reality TV show about autistic people that shows them to fit a neurotypical mould. But also, why not? Wouldn’t a more varied representation of autism give neurotypical viewers a better idea of what autism actually is?
Probably. But that’s never been Love On The Spectrum’s objective. This isn’t a show that’s about offering the world nuanced representations of autism and disability; it’s about prioritising the enjoyment of neurotypical viewers at autists’ expense. “The producers want its talent to mask in a way to make the audience happy,” says Delmenico, “instead of actually doing it for the benefit for the people on the show”.
“The producers want its talent to mask in a way to make the audience happy,” says Delmenico, “instead of actually doing it for the benefit for the people on the show”.
Exploiting people with disabilities isn’t exactly a new concept. In 2014, the late disability activist Stella Young condemned the cultural tendency to depict people with disabilities as “objects of inspiration” for non disabled people. By working to distance autistic people from neurotypicals, and unbelievably, not even paying their talent, Love On The Spectrum only adds to that tradition.
No wonder (neurotypical) actor Bradley Cooper says it’s his favourite “comfort” show. By presenting autism as a “dilemma to be solved”, Love On The Spectrum has been carefully curated for the comfort of neurotypicals: “It’s just really gross,” says Delmenico, “because it’s like, we don’t exist for other people…. we exist so that we can exist just like everyone else.”
Maybe this is what happens when nice white people who probably haven’t experienced any kind of marginalisation in their lives try to understand minorities, because it looks like they’re doing it again. Northern Pictures’ new dating show, Better Date Than Never, drops later this month, and their casting call – which sought out dateless Australians who “identify as being diverse” – must be seen to be believed.
I do not know who needs to know this, but no one in this world identifies as “diverse”. Diversity can only happen in the context of a variety of people bringing different things to the table – a quality that the team at Northern Pictures clearly lacks. The first season of Better Date Than Never features disabled contributors, a trans woman, and [checks notes] a Chinese queer man. What?
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Northern Pictures had another spinoff in the works called Do Asians Experience Love? We wait, with bated breath, for a release date.