Watching "Parenthood": Asperger's alert

There's a new television show called, "Parenthood", on NBC Tuesdays at 10 PM. (No, I do not stay up to watch it; I watch it online the day after). The show involves a family of sisters and brothers and their own families, with kid troubles and financial troubles and school troubles. I started watching the show because I like Lauren Graham, from "Gilmore Girls", and am sad to say she is still playing a kooky single mother (Type casting, anyone?). But I stick with the show b/c one of the adult brothers has a son recently diagnosed with Asperger's. How do they fare at portraying a child with Asperger's?

I have to give this kid actor credit...he does get the flat affect, slightly clumsy, sensory-challenged bit down. He also nails the obsessions, the rituals, and the lack of social awareness well. What the show doesn't do is portray the situations in which the family finds itself very realistically. Max, the boy with Asperger's, get expelled from school (and this is in the fictional USA, where this is illegal to do). The parents struggle for about three days to find a school, are told they have to wait a year, beg the principal/director to evaluate their child, saying "You'll love him"...as if accepting a child into a private school was based on whether or not the administration 'likes' the child. And then once he is accepted, there's no debate over how they are going to pay this very expensive tuition. No IEP, no school district involvement, no mediation or hearings or expert witnesses. This family seems just to assume they will pay for it. And, on the first day, the child runs happily into the school as if being with only other children with autism is the best thing he's ever seen. No struggles, no fights about why he isn't going to his old school, no behaviors at all. And no qualms on the parents' part about sending their son to a 'special school'. In fact, no talk at all about what this 'special school' actually does with their students.

And so the TV show "Parenthood" does a decent job of talking about living with a difference in the family, some of the parents' heartache and fear, a lot of disappointment and just a little denial, but little accuracy in how Asperger's is actually portrayed. Well, I am not surprised. The writers are , in all likelihood, unfamiliar with Asperger's and may or may not have had a consultant in writing this child into the script. And they are limited by the 43-minute-drama hour, in which conflicts have to be resolved quickly. But wouldn't it be nice if just for once, a TV show got the behaviors accurately for once? Told the truth on television? Or is Asperger's in real life just something that the writers think wouldn't sell?