It’s a succinct introduction to his world, where a jaunt to the coffee shop is a gantlet of dogs, noisy trucks and skateboarders, each a potentially derailing stimulus. In the opening scene, the trio’s aide, Mandy (Sosie Bacon), talks him through a walk down the street via his phone earbuds, like mission control guiding a spacewalk. Jack (Rick Glassman) is a gifted computer programmer unable to keep himself from calling his co-workers idiots.Īnd Harrison (Albert Rutecki) has a crippling fear of venturing out in public. Violet, intense and hungry to live, is fixated on finding a boyfriend, the key to a vision of a “normal” life that is heavily influenced by lifestyle magazines and Instagram. Instead, it simply lets them be people - funny, passionate, sometimes frustrating - which helps the first season, arriving Friday on Amazon Prime Video, create a vibrant world in eight short episodes. The beauty of this comedy-drama is that it neither downplays the characters’ difference nor romanticizes it. The word “normal” comes up a lot in “As We See It.” It’s a goal, a dream and, maybe, a myth.
Or as Violet (Sue Ann Pien), one of the roommates the series follows through its first season, puts it: “How am I supposed to have a normal life?” Hanging over each of these small struggles is the question of whether the characters can find the independence and self-sufficiency that others take for granted. For the three young adults with autism who are the charming, complicated leads of this new series, a date is not simply a date, a job is not simply a job, a walk outside is not simply a stroll. By the standards of TV’s apocalypse stories and corporate civil wars, the stakes in “As We See It” could hardly be lower: Finding a date, getting a job, merely leaving the house.īut the stakes also could hardly be higher.