Review: New Sundance miniseries ‘A Word’ addictively watchable

Set mid the majestic fells of England’s Lake District, Sundance TV’s new miniseries “The A Word” is immediately beautiful. Performed by the inevitably strong cast of a BBC production, it is addictively watchable. But what makes Peter Bowker’s adaptation of the Israeli series “Yellow Peppers” so remarkable is its ability to tell the story of a family coming to terms with a young boy’s autism both specifically and as a metaphor.

Also it has a truly epic soundtrack.

Once shrouded in secrecy and ignorance, autism has become a common topic in the news, general conversation and on television. So common, in fact, that its reality is often diluted if not downright hijacked— “on the spectrum” has become a joking reference to all manner of personal quirks and odd habits.

So the first thing “The A Word” does is remind everyone that being “on the spectrum” is not a joke. But neither is it the end of the world. In “The A Word,” a much larger cognitive limitation is the more universal reluctance to face reality.

Which makes “The A Word” sound grim and preachy, which it is absolutely is not. The series (and indeed, every episode) opens with a shot of a young boy walking down a long, lonely road, England’s untamed hills rearing up on either side. But what could be a disconcerting or even sinister image is made joyful by the child’s swinging gait and the music in his head; Joe is rarely without big blue headphones and he often sings along to bands ranging from the Arctic Monkeys to Human League.

He is met by two men in a blue van who, in what is clearly a long-standing ritual, take him back to his house. There his parents, Alison (Morven Christie) and Paul (“George Gently’s” Lee Ingleby), cling to the near-shredded hope that this sort of thing is completely normal, that their son Joe (Max Vento) is bright but reserved, occasionally overstimulated and deeply attached to his music.

During a feverishly overplanned’ 5th birthday party, Alison underplays and excuses her son’s obvious disconnection from the festivities while Paul seems to accept the slender bridge created by the playlists they both love.

Alison’s father, Maurice (Christopher Eccleston), makes a few brusque observations but as sweeping and unrequested opinions are obviously his vernacular, they are met with reflexive defensiveness.

It is a brief but breathtakingly universal portrait of a family’s unspoken agreement to ignore the obvious, broken only by the arrival of outsiders.

In this case, they are Alison’s brother Eddie (Greg McHugh) and his wife, Nicola (Vinette Robinson), who are having avoidance issues of their own. But Nicola is a doctor, and when Eddie finally expresses what everyone can see, the Hughes family is forced into a cycle of action and reaction that reveals as much about their communication issues as it does Joe’s.

Barely able to accept the diagnosis, Alison immediately sets out to “fix” the problem herself; in her desperate, self-consulting resolution she pushes everyone, including Paul and her teenage daughter, Rebecca (Molly Wright), aside in favor of her own internal soundtrack.

Eddie and Nicola, attempting to recover from their own setbacks, have their own pattern of carefully constructed half-truths while Maurice, still grieving the death of his wife, swings between making sweeping pronouncements and obsessively runs the hills.

At one point, midway through the series, a therapist meticulously points out the family’s various communication tics and what they hide. It’s amusing, unsettling and insightful, and though there is an acknowledged temptation to equate such things with autism, they instead serve as way to make the situation universal.

Every family faces crisis, every person confronts a moment when they must surrender the beliefs or expectations they had about someone they love, the test is what he or she does next.

Subplots involving the building of Paul’s new gastropub, Eddie’s takeover of Maurice’s brewery and Rebecca’s burgeoning love life save the storyline from too much familial navel-gazing. Joe’s autism may have prompted a crisis, but very few crises stop life in its tracks: Work is important, Rebecca also needs parents; marriage requires attention.

In the center of the chaos is Joe, who, by his very nature, is the only one untouched by it. Vento’s angelic face and watchful performance make Joe a radiant figure at times, but “The A Word” does not sentimentalize his condition. Indeed, the frustrations he and his family feel are so real that they shatter the unhealthy but typical patterns that so often pass for a person’s “manner” or a family’s “way.”

In telling its truth about autism, “The A Word” also illuminates a larger battle. The prescription for serenity may be to accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can and learn how to know the difference, but how do ordinary, flawed humans actually pull it off, day after day after day?

The Hughes family does it the way most of us do: imperfectly, through trial and error, because, in the end, it’s the only real choice.

‘The A Word’

Where: Sundance

When: 10 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DLS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sex)