Ludwig and Patience: Two puzzle-loving detectives each missing a piece

It’s not hard to see the similarities between Ludwig and Patience, two British crime dramas released a few months apart. Both shows feature puzzle-obsessed characters who are drawn into police investigations, where their talents naturally lead to them piecing together the answers to various murders.

Ludwig stars David Mitchell as a reclusive professional puzzle-setter, who has to assume the identity of his identical twin brother – a detective – in order to help his wife and son track him down. In doing so, the eponymous hero accidentally gets dragged into the man’s day job of solving crimes and catching killers.

Patience, meanwhile, stars Ella Maisy Purvis as an autistic woman (Purvis is herself autistic) who works in the criminal records office in the York police station. Due to her love of puzzles and ability to spot patterns, she ends up drawing connections between an apparent suicide and two historical cases.

Ludwig, the show, does everything almost perfectly. Patience, unfortunately, only does one thing very well – but it’s exactly what Ludwig is missing.

The missing piece of Ludwig

That one thing? Autism. The character of Ludwig is not openly autistic. Yet he has a lot of traits that we all recognise: he’s obsessed with puzzles (like Patience is), he has a very set routine (like Patience), he has a lot of anxiety about going to new places (like… you get the idea), he can’t do small talk (tick!), and he gets overwhelmed going to strange and noisy new environments.

And yet, in the show, these are just his quirks. He’s a character where autistic behaviours are used to make him an oddball, without neurodiversity ever being mentioned.

This is my one main gripe with an otherwise excellent show. I feel this is something that writers do often. They take the outward presentations of our experience and use them to make their characters interesting. But because these characters are never actually named as being neurodiverse, even if they sometimes admit they have challenges, what we never see is the reasons behind these particular behaviours.

So when Ludwig is bad at small talk or when he wants to stick to a routine, that’s just one of his little weird behaviours. It doesn’t acknowledge the immense anxiety that autistic people face navigating a neurotypical world and the need for behaviours that help them to cope with this.

It stops people understanding us – in fact, without an explanation, this sort of presentation of autistic behaviours as idiosyncrasies strengthens the misguided notion that we just need to try a bit harder and push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

A fair and balanced depiction of autism?

Which is why Patience seemed like such a promising show. The eponymous main character – and a woman, at that; women are often overlooked when it comes to autism – played by an actor who is herself autistic, is portrayed brilliantly.

Having said that, I do have to acknowledge that some (neurodiverse) reviewers and viewers have said that it’s actually not a good portrayal – that it’s clunky, stereotypical and outdated.

I’ve only known about my neurodiversity for just over a year at the time of writing, so I’m aware what seems fresh and enlightening to me may well be tired and reductive to others.

All I can say is that I think if you’re going to do a crime show featuring an autistic protagonist, it makes sense that puzzles are their special interest. It makes sense that they rigidly follow routines, because murder is messy and unpredictable. You want that conflict.

And Patience has challenges I recognise, such as planning and rehearsing conversations, being unsure what to do in strange environments, and feeling overwhelmed in unusual situations.

I’ve only watched the first two episodes, for reasons we’ll get into in a minute, but I feel like over the course of the series the viewer will continue to get more of an exploration behind the reasons for those behaviours. Exactly what Ludwig is lacking.

Testing the audience’s…

Despite this strong link, these two shows otherwise couldn’t be further apart. Ludwig is stylish and funny, and filled with interesting mysteries that really bring out the puzzle-loving aspect of its protagonist.

Patience, the other hand, is full of wooden dialogue and performances, plain cinematography and tepid pacing, a bizarre opening mystery and, aside of Purvis’s portrayal of Patience herself, is very heavy-handed in its references to the challenges and strengths of people with autism.

Even when the autistic characters are talking about themselves and their experience, it comes across like extracts of a Wikipedia page.

There was one scene in particular at a support group where it felt like the autistic adults should have turned directly to the camera whilst talking about the challenges they faced navigating a neurotypical world.

So, while I eagerly await a second season of Ludwig, I haven’t made it past the second episode of Patience. I really wanted this to be a great show. I wanted some positive autistic representation, that balances our challenges with our strengths, and shows that, actually, we’re just people who experience the world differently, trying to go about our lives, and that we’re capable of a lot.

But no matter how good Ella Maisy Purvis is, you can’t save what is otherwise a less than mediocre crime show. If the writers of Patience and Ludwig could get together, they’d each be able to markedly improve the other, although while Ludwig just needs a clear steer on one particular point, Patience needs all the help it can get.


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Header photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

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