Patience review – this clunky depiction of autism just isn’t good enough

Welcome to your first odd-couple detective drama of 2025. Patience is an adaptation by Matt Baker (Hotel Portofino, Before We Die) of Franco-Belgian creation Astrid et Raphaëlle. It’s about the evolving partnership between a young autistic cataloguer of police evidence (here named Patience and played by Ella Maisy Purvis), and dedicated older detective Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser), who pulls her out of her comfort zone after recognising that Patience’s secret talents as a criminologist are being wasted in the bowels of the archive. She adds the unwilling young woman to her investigative team after Patience links the DCI’s current case – a man with apparently everything to live for, who self-immolates after withdrawing £8,000 from the bank and dropping it in a car park bin – with others that were dismissed as suicides but actually make no sense as such.

Off they trot, uncovering an increasingly preposterous plot involving the suggestibility-inducing drug scopolamine, a jittery hotel maid, a sex addict, a missing sister, a sceptical boss who says things such as “Spare me the intuition” when brought several mountains of circumstantial evidence, plus cigars left at all the crime scenes. One hopes that in real life it wouldn’t have taken the introduction of a preternaturally talented pattern-spotter to see that this might be a link between the deaths, but I gather policing is fairly dismal across the board these days, so who knows. After a new victim, a telling matchbook from a hotel and two very drawn-out episodes, we eventually get resolution.

Preposterousness aside, Patience is, at best, a by-the-numbers piece of work – see sceptical boss, above, and add the domestic tribulations of the divorced Metcalf and the troubled son of whom she lost custody to her ex-husband because of her devotion to her job. At worst, it’s embarrassingly clunky and ham-fisted, especially – and unexpectedly, given modern sensitivities to such portrayals – when it comes to Patience’s autism. All the boxes are ticked: she is great at pattern recognition! And puzzles! She doesn’t like to be touched and she listens to music through headphones all the time to cut out external stimuli!

Look in vain for any nuance, any new insight into living with this condition. What viewers get instead is her attendance at a group for autistic adults, where each person disgorges a “trouble” and speaks like a clip from a public information film. One wonders whether to reveal his diagnosis at work. “But why is the onus always on us to declare ourselves? To make ourselves stand out, as if there is something shameful about being neuroatypical?” he says. Now, this is a terrible line in and of itself, but more importantly it is one that, if you are trying to dispel ignorance among a television audience, presupposes bad faith among everyone and raises more questions than it answers. Does revealing a condition make it appear shameful? Isn’t the onus always on anyone to declare something only they know is affecting them – be it a physical, neurological or mental condition, and whether it’s temporary (such as cancer treatment or a bereavement) or chronic?

Laura Fraser as detective Bea Metcalf in Patience. Photograph: Channel 4 / Toon Aerts

Patience herself is hardly more than a cipher. She is given little to do other than fiddle with puzzles, remind people that she doesn’t like to be touched and that she likes order, and try to guard against the burnout that will apparently occur if she ever puts a toe out of the archive and engages with the messy world of crime-solving. And, of course, put those pattern-recognition abilities that all and only autistic people have to work in the pursuit of the scopolamine killer, with a side order of unexpected Spanish translation skills thrown in when the clues start to point to Belize.

It is deeply uninspired stuff, with more than a few plot holes (including letting the jittery hotel maid who found one of the bodies run off without being questioned because her manager tells them “her English isn’t good”). There is a potentially nice pseudo-maternal relationship established between Patience and Metcalf, but this only slightly offsets the clunkers elsewhere: Metcalf persuading Patience to join the team by casually likening a murder case to one of those puzzles she enjoys so much (“You don’t say!” replies Patience); also gazing at her troubled son and wondering if he could be autistic too, now that she has had her eyes opened by Patience and her support group. Spare me, and spare yourselves.