NBC’s Brilliant Minds offers the best neurodivergent representation I’ve ever seen.
As an autistic person, I’m hyper-aware of the stereotypes and negative tropes that plague most characters who have any type of neurodivergence.
Even The Good Doctor, despite making huge strides in this area, created more problems than it solved., though Brilliant Minds owes it a debt of gratitude.
Wolf’s Neurodivergence Is Only Part Of His Story On Brilliant Minds
One of the most important ways that Brilliant Minds is different is that it’s about a doctor who is neurodivergent rather than focusing solely on his neurodivergence as a source of conflict.
Sure, Brilliant Minds Season 1 Episode 1 began with Wolf getting fired because he took a patient with dementia out of the hospital without permission, but that was about his unorthodox methods, not his face-blindness or other neurodivergent traits.
Of course, neurodivergent people are more likely to break the rules in this manner. We’re often loath to follow guidelines that seem to impede progress more than they help it.
Still, that story sets Wolf up as someone who gets in trouble because he approaches medicine differently than others, rather than someone that everyone doubts because of his neurodivergence.
It’s a subtle but important difference between Brilliant Minds and The Good Doctor.
More often than not, The Good Doctor was about the ways Shaun’s autism interfered with his success.
Either his rigidity and need for sameness threw him totally off when something disrupted his routine, his bluntness offended someone, or some doctor decided he shouldn’t be a surgeon because he is autistic.
The Good Doctor’s portrayal of autistic characters was meant to be inspiring, but its insistence on making Shaun’s autism a source of conflict inadvertently reinforced stereotypes about autistic people, especially the idea that it’s nearly impossible for them to succeed in traditional careers.
So far, Brilliant Minds has avoided that trap. Wolf is neither a savant nor someone whose neurodivergent-related challenges are treated as a serious obstacle to success.
Instead, his neurodivergence is one part of him, and he has long ago learned to compensate for his difficulties so he can succeed.
The closest his face-blindness comes to being a serious obstacle is when Nichols complains that Wolf ignores him in the hallways, which Wolf quickly clears up by explaining how his condition makes it so that he literally doesn’t see Nichols when he walks past him
The Intersection of Wolf’s Neurodivergence and Past Trauma Is Clearer
Brilliant Minds does something similar to what The Good Doctor Season 1 did: it utilizes flashbacks of Wolf’s childhood to explore the trauma that made him the man he is today.
However, the focus is different. While Shaun’s brother, Steve’s, death on The Good Doctor was inarguably traumatic, its effect on him was mostly limited to the plot point of Glassman taking him in afterward.
It wasn’t until he began thinking about having children of his own that Steve’s death was mentioned in any other context.
Conversely, Wolf’s trauma on Brilliant Minds is… trauma.
His father’s mental illness and subsequent death affected him deeply as a teenager and are intertwined with his neurodivergence.
Wolf has grown up to be someone who works hard as a doctor to help others and is passionate about caring for patients, particularly ones that the world wants him to give up on, yet is closed off to most relationships.
He didn’t even want to teach interns when he first returned to Bronx General.
That isn’t treated simply as “neurodivergent man has poor social skills.” Sure, that’s part of it, but he also is afraid to let anyone get too close because of that early loss.
Wolf is also an openly gay man who grew up in a time when it wasn’t safe for him to be out.
That’s important on several levels.
At a time when LGBTQ+ representation on TV is declining, we need more characters like Wolf.
I especially like that Wolf’s relationship with his sexual orientation, and with relationships in general, is complicated.
He embraces who he is yet doesn’t want to let anyone be too close to him for various reasons. His trauma around relationships leads him into a difficult situation with Nichols, his one-time enemy who will undoubtedly be his love interest someday.
He’s a gay protagonist, not a gay secondary character, and I’m willing to bet he won’t suddenly die in a gay-bashing incident to prove the point that homophobia is on the rise as The Good Doctor did to Asher on The Good Doctor Season 7 Episode 5.
(Yes, I’m still bitter about that and always will be. The needless death of a gay character is not okay just because a gay writer approved of the story.)
It’s unheard of to have neurodivergent LGBTQ+ characters on TV, even though there’s significant overlap between the two communities, especially the trans and autistic communities.
Wolf Demonstrates That Neurodivergence Looks Different On Each Person
Wolf is not autistic; he’s got a different neurodivergent condition called prosopagnosia, which means he doesn’t recognize faces and has to memorize specific details about each person’s appearance so that he can remember who they are.
This is a different condition than we’ve ever had on TV before, with the exception of an episode of Picket Fences in 1992 in which a man used that condition as his defense for murdering his brother.
It’s done honestly and demonstrates the ways it is similar to and different from autism. It’s also not the only neurodivergent condition on Brilliant Minds.
Van has Mirror Touch Synthesia, a rare condition in which he feels the pain and other symptoms of his patients, and Dana has an anxiety disorder that comes from the trauma of her sister’s death.
(And yes, these are types of neurodivergence even though they aren’t the splashy ones that tend to be misrepresented on TV.
There are many more examples of brains being wired differently than autism and ADHD, though proper representation of these is also important.)
Featuring all of these different characters helps prevent the major problem with The Good Doctor, which was that Shaun was an anamoly who no one understood or was at all like.
Until the final season, he was the only autistic person, doctor or not, on the entire series, which reinforced the idea that autism was unusual and difficult to deal with.
There Would Be No Brilliant Minds Without The Good Doctor
None of this means that The Good Doctor was a terrible series.
It was an important show that broke some important barriers. Despite its missteps, it took the idea of autistic people being human seriously.
It did not focus on how hard autism was for other people. It wasn’t about how “tragic” it is for parents to have an autistic child or any of that crap.
That’s why I don’t think Brilliant Minds could exist without The Good Doctor.
Before this series, it was unheard of to have a show about an autistic doctor, never mind any other neurodivergent condition.
Sure, the producers could have pitched it.
But would NBC, or any other network, have bought it when there was no evidence that audiences had an appetite for neurodivergent characters, never mind one as well-rounded as Oliver Wolf?
Of course, there’s no way to know, but I think it would have been a much harder sell.
I don’t think it’s that Brilliant Minds is superior to The Good Doctor as much as it is that it built on what The Good Doctor started and made something even better, even more representative of autistic people.
Over to you, Brilliant Minds fanatics!
What do you think? Is Brilliant Minds building on The Good Doctor’s legacy, or would it always have come into the TV world the way it did?
Hit the comments and let us know your thoughts!
Brilliant Minds airs on NBC on Mondays at 10/9c and on Peacock on Tuesdays.
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