Patience debuted on PBS Sunday, June 15. New episodes air weekly.
Despite its endeavor to take a new approach to the police procedural, Patience – British screenwriter Matt Baker’s plodding six-part series revolving around an autistic police archivist-turned-investigator – leans on tired tropes at every turn. Much like staples of the genre like Psych or Monk, it hopes to cash in on the dazzling special skills and enigmatic unconventionality of its central detective. But there’s a limit to Patience’s interest in carving out any proper depth to its protagonist, giving her a meaty backstory, or venturing beyond her surface-level motivations. The result is a series that – in spite of some valiant attempts by its actors to lift a clunky script – is mechanical, soulless and stale. Considering the general lack of autistic women on TV, it’s a real missed opportunity.
The titular main character, hard-nosed puzzle-lover Patience Evans (Ella Maisy Purvis, who, like her character, is neurodivergent), works in the criminal records department hidden in the basement of a police bureau in the quaint UK town of York. The opening sequence follows her at home, timing herself as she solves a gift-shop puzzle to a backing of whimsical orchestral music. Simultaneously, in a bank, a glassy-eyed man takes out a hefty lump sum before heading to a car park, dousing himself in gasoline, and lighting a match. From the first beep of Patience’s stopwatch, there’s a tonal rift between cozy crime drama and gritty cop thriller that can’t quite be bridged. It’s also an early giveaway of a tendency to see Patience as an oddity rather than a rounded, relatable character.
This is the latest in a string of apparent suicides Patience is semi-miraculously able to link together into one murder investigation. When she starts dropping hints by sending additional, unrequested files upstairs to the investigations department, she catches the attention of Detective Inspector Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser), an unusually, slightly disconcertingly warm antithesis to the stereotypical hard-as-nails police constable.
Discovering the 20-something’s handy flair for identifying crucial details and patterns that neurotypical officers in the department miss, Bea takes Patience under her wing, ensuring her talents are no longer squandered in the storeroom. Patience becomes unofficial “assistant investigator,” presumably without the pay rise. But Bea’s colleagues take less kindly to Patience’s arrival: One minor character remarks that Patience got her name because it will “take every ounce of yours to deal with her.” She’s surrounded by a cast of characters who are endlessly frustrated by their new coworker, each proving their backwardness in a way that feels stage-managed and slightly absurd rather than totally believable.
Even as Patience is lured out from the safety of the criminal records department and bravely enters this new realm, she’s oddly sidelined by her namesake show. Episodes alternate between scenes with the budding detective and ones with the senior police officers. These quip-heavy check-ins seem intended to leaven some of the heaviness of Patience’s storyline – except the sparkless dialogue and feeble humor mean they function as little more than dressed-up exposition.
Though Patience is supposed to unfold from its main character’s perspective, her lack of involvement in numerous parts of the plot, the narrow, unsubtle gamut of ways she makes her presence felt onscreen (briskly walking York’s streets while wearing noise-cancelling headphones, storming off, furrowing her eyebrows, clenching her fists), and the dogged emphasis on how others perceive her as an outsider suggest otherwise. At every point where we start to empathize, we’re reeled back into the point-of-view of her colleagues. And, wherever Patience goes, she’s accompanied by the show’s sweeping, fanciful score, encouraging us to see her from a distance – to view her not as a person living her life or doing her job, but as an object of patronizing awe.
Much of Baker’s problem lies in trying too hard to make Patience’s internal world external, forcing her to constantly explain away her behavior and feelings in a script that is both artificial and trite. Too much of the screentime manages to feel like a rote exercise in teaching non-autistic viewers about autistic traits, while bulldozing over any of the autistic characters’ nuances in the process. There’s also a confounding lack of consistency and attention to detail, from incongruity between shots to plot holes to uneven character development. One of Patience’s few redeeming qualities is that its cases of the week each start out with an intriguing premise for a crime – but even these wind up rushed-through and half-baked, with a distinct lack of riveting murderers.
