Welcome to the weekly TV thread. Next week, I’ll be paying tribute to the late Malcolm-Jamal Warner. This week, I’m discussing a British show Pajiba’s Dustin Rowles has called “the best weekly series currently airing.”

Patience is a British remake of a show I’ve never seen, the French procedural Astrid et Raphaëlle, whose sixth season will air on France 2 later this year. It has nothing to do with Patience from Ghosts. I kept expecting to see in the first episode a high-strung Puritan lady who repeatedly says her own name.

The first season of Patience, which debuted on Channel 4 in January, began airing for the first time in America on June 15 on PBS. I burned through all six episodes of the first season after I saw Chicago Tribune TV critic Nina Metz praising Patience’s depiction of autism because it “neither infantilizes the [title] character nor treats her as a brilliant but robotic savant who cracks a case by simply scanning a room.” Metz has been critical of current procedurals like Elsbeth for either fawning over the police or, in the case of Hugh Dancy-era Law & Order, giving the lead actors colorless dialogue that makes her long for the days of Jerry Orbach and Steven Hill’s snarky dialogue. I said to myself, “Patience must be really sharply written if this is the one current procedural Metz likes.”

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Belgian composer Hannes De Maeyer’s wistful main title theme from Patience.

The show centers on Patience Evans, an autistic archivist in the Yorkshire Police’s criminal records department, and her struggles with stimuli and disruptions to her routine (autistic folks can’t stand changes to their routines). She also has a photographic memory of details from case files, which impresses Detective Inspector Bea Metcalf (played by the top-billed Laura Fraser from Breaking Bad and long before that show, the charming A Knight’s Tale, which was the first place where I saw Fraser).

Bea adds the clerk as a consultant to her team and finds herself becoming a maternal figure to Patience, whose mentally unstable mother abandoned her when she was six. (Patience’s single father, who found a way to bond with the then-uncommunicative Patience by introducing her to puzzles and mystery novels, was a cop who was later killed in the line of duty.) The inspector also learns to think more like Patience while piecing together cases and being a single mom to her son, who has undiagnosed ADHD. The thing that makes Patience stand out from other procedurals that are built around autistic characters (The Good Doctor) or characters with neurodivergent traits (Bones) is that Patience is played by an actual autistic performer, Ella Maisy Purvis (she had supporting roles in shows like A Kind of Spark and is great in her first lead role), and all the members of Patience’s autistic support group are also played by autistic actors.

I liked Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s first season when it became a hit on Netflix in the summer of 2022, but now Extraordinary Attorney Woo just feels dated in comparison to Patience’s approach to casting because Woo Young-woo, an autistic lawyer, is played by allistic K-drama star Park Eun-bin. (In journalist Geoffrey Bunting’s 2022 Polygon article on Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Son Da-eun from Autism Partnership Korea said that “the show does reinforce a few common misconceptions about the nature and treatment of autism” and added, “The fact that the vast majority of characters with autism in media is portrayed as having a superpower, or that autism is really a blessing in disguise muddies the waters and can confuse the public as to what autism really is.”) I’m not neurodivergent (although one thing I have in common with neurotypicals is that I suffer from misophonia), so I’m not the best person to comment on whether or not Patience’s depiction of autism is authentic, but it’s great to see autistic characters being played by autistic people for a change. (Sara Mortensen, who stars as the autistic Astrid on the original show, is allistic.)

As for the murder mysteries on the show, they range from surprisingly intriguing (the Michael Clayton-esque conspiracy in “My Brother’s Keeper” begins with a corpse walking out of a morgue) to “this was okay, but the product placement for Amazon Prime was really strange” (the murder of a mystery author in “The Locked Room”). The best thing about these mysteries is that, like Metz said, the show doesn’t treat Patience as a superhero. She’s not at all like the usual procedural supergenius who waltzes into a room full of suspects late in the episode to give an extraordinary summation that reveals the murderer. She’s more like an unassuming team player whose knowledge of overlooked details leads to Bea and DS Jake Hunter, her partner, solving the case.

Patience’s second season is currently filming. Next season, Patience, who prefers the company of animals over people, will pursue a romantic relationship with Tom Lewis’s character, the allistic Elliot Scott, a crime scene manager she’s attracted to in the first season.

However, Fraser left the show. Jessica Hynes will replace her and play DI Frankie Monroe, Patience’s new boss. Today’s prompt is: What’s your favorite casting change that took place because an actor died or left the show like Fraser did? For instance, I’ve been watching for the first time a couple of episodes of The Avengers’s one-season Ian Hendry era, which was mostly erased from existence by ITV, on YouTube, as well as a bunch of episodes of The Avengers’s Honor Blackman era on Tubi. Hendry—who starred as Dr. David Keel, a surgeon who joins forces with secret agent John Steed to avenge the murder of his fiancée (that was why it was called The Avengers)—quit the show to pursue a movie career. Though Hendry was solid as Keel in the two episodes I saw him in, the replacement of Hendry with Blackman as Cathy Gale—the leather-clad anthropologist/judo expert who preceded Diana Rigg’s immensely popular Emma Peel—energized the show. I don’t think The Avengers would have lasted as long as it did if Steed went after “extraordinary crimes against the people and the state” with another male partner.