The A Word: Season 1, Episode 2

More and more, The A Word is becoming the television version of a jelly doughnut, except the center is kind of nutritious and satisfying while the outside shell is pretty greasy and saccharine. The show revolves around the life of Joe Hughes (Max Vento), a young boy with autism, and his parents’ struggle with acceptance. The further away from this core the show goes, the more it slips into nearly intolerable melodrama.

A lot of television falls into one of two worldviews. The first dictates a kind of puritan morality, in which good is rewarded, bad is punished, and everyone gets what they deserve. The other is an indulgent nihilism. In TV land, the world tends to be either moral and just or amoral and random. To be fair, writer Peter Bowker’s avoidance of either pole should be lauded.

The second episode resolves around Joe’s mother, Alison Hughes (Morven Christie), and her decision to pull Joe out of school. The episode catalogs Joe’s schooling options, all of which are flawed. Placing him in a special needs school ensures that he won’t be bullied, but will cull him from the general population. Placing him in the public school system will expose him to bullying, and many schools aren’t set up to deal with autistic children. The final option, home schooling, involves a great deal of time, effort, and concentration that neither Paul Hughes (Lee Ingleby) nor Alison have to invest. Plus, as Maurice Scott (Christopher Eccleson), the family patriarch so tactlessly exclaims: “Home schooling? I’m not meaning to be offensive but if Joe’s damaged stock already, won’t that make him even more of an oddball?”

Bowker sets up Paul as the heart, and Alison as the head, as they try to come to a decision. While it’s a bit of a conceit, it’s effective and slightly unexpected. Paul empathizes with his son’s feelings. Alison focuses on what’s best, but defines best through her eyes. The unexpected part is that often empathy is tied with emotion, and therefore blurs or distorts reality to how people want to perceive it. The A Word does a good job of turning that, and the concept that “thinking” people are somehow stoic and function dispassionately removed from emotion, on its head. While all of Alison’s decisions are made with the pretext of being in Joe’s best interest, many are informed by her pride. This isn’t to say Alison is the villain of the show; she clearly loves her son despite her limitations.

Bowker does a good job of capturing exactly how hard it is to parent a special needs child. We see Joe throw a fit and destroy some furniture when his music is cut off. He keeps his mother at the movies for a full day. He wanders off on his own. In one of the episode’s most effective scenes, Joe’s older sister Rebecca (Molly Wright), desperate for her parents’ attention, walks in on a fight between her mother and father. No matter what she does, however, she gets ignored. Finally, she gives up and just goes outside to play on the swings with Joe.

We later find out that Molly’s being pressured by her boyfriend into having sex. Bowker links her parents’ neglect with her decision to give in to her boyfriend’s pressure. She comes home to an empty house and just figures, what the hell — no one’s home, might as well lose my virginity. This dynamic plays out as complex and nuanced until her uncle Eddie Scott (Greg McHugh) comes in and interrupts their tryst. There’s an absurd comic moment when the boyfriend turns to leave and the condom stuck to his back falls to the floor. The comic contrivance, however, is more than compensated for by the comic surprise. From there the scene unravels into something that resembles more of an after-school special than a serious drama. Eddie clumsily spews out platitudes. Rebecca blushes and nods in agreement. All leave understanding that losing your virginity is an important decision that should be deeply considered before acted being on.

This scene acts as a bridge to the rest of the show, because all of the other characters are almost exclusively defined by their sex lives. Eddie is the cuckold husband to Nicola Daniels (Vinette Robinson). In this episode, Alison asks Nicola to get a second opinion on Joe’s condition. In what seems like the most absurd contrivance, the best person she knows is Michael (Rhashan Stone), who happens to be the man she had an affair with. Just to make sure we know how contrived this is, Bower has four characters comment on it: Nicola, who has no problem telling her husband that she did want to shag her former lover; Eddie, who thinks that he needs to prove his trust to the woman who cheated on him; Michael, who points out that any doctor could go over the file; and finally, Maurice, who tells Eddie that secretly Nicola wanted him to forbid her to go see her lover, and Eddie failed the test.

The episode has another subplot where Maurice’s voice instructor Louise Wilson (Pooky Quesnel) chases him down on a public street. Apparently, Maurice has been avoiding her since he rebuked her sexual advances in episode one. She chastises him, expressing shock that someone would terminate a relationship simply because one of the people made a sexual advance on the other. The scene ends with her proclaiming that they’ll speak not one more word on the subject, a declaration to which one can imagine the entire audience saying in unison, “We can only hope so”. Otherwise, it appears that Bowker defines the world almost entirely in terms of either dealing with autism or having sex.