The A Word is a family drama centered around Joe Hughes (Max Vento), a five-year-old child with autism. The show opens with Joe’s uncle, Eddie Scott (Greg McHugh) — who’s coming home with his adulterous wife Dr. Nicola Daniels (Vinette Robinson) to live with his brother — trying to navigate a car with a small trailer up a driveway. The visual is a great, if unintended, metaphor for the episode as a whole. Writer Peter Bowker seems to be trying to combine a social realism drama with an absurdist farce. Director Peter Cattaneo’s lingering shots and documentary feel add to the weirdness of it all.
It’s an utter shame because the best parts of the show depict the family dealing with coming to terms with Joe’s condition. The other melodramatic stories at best distract and at worst undermine the believability of the family’s central crisis.
The episode tracks Joe’s parents, Alison (Morven Christie) and Paul Hughes (Lee Ingleby) trying to accept their son’s condition; their performances represents many of the believable moments throughout the episode. Both seem, at times, to be paralyzed by a combination of shame and fear, and Christie and Ingelby do a good job of capturing these moments in which they just seem clueless on how to handle their son. Thanks to Bowker’s writing and strong performances by Christie and Ingleby, we see how much they care. Near the end, Paul decides to take his son on a picnic and makes a series of bad decisions that culminate in moments of pathos. While a bit contrived and manipulative, it does give a window into the challenges of raising an autistic child.
The sincerity of this aspect of the episode is offset by the farce of the Eddie Scott and Dr. Nicola Daniels’ soap opera. Eddie is Alison’s brother who set off and failed at a business. Defeated, he boomerangs back home and accepts a job at his father’s brewery. He brings with him his wife, whom we quickly learn has cheated on him in the past. Adding to the absurdity is that somehow everyone in the town seems to know he’s been cuckolded; along with his business failures, he gets an extra dose of humiliation. To his credit, McHugh does a great job of capturing a sad-sack guy who seems almost completely overwhelmed by life.
Less understandable is why his wife gives up her London placement to tag along with her passive aggressive husband to live as the small town’s Hester Prynne. The central defining element of her character thus far is her unfaithfulness, yet she gives up her career in the big city to tag along to and live with her husband’s family and be the town harlot. As absurd as this scenario sounds, it possibly could’ve been pulled off if there was some depth to either character. Maybe they’d stay together if Eddie had some hint of an iota of charm, or Nicola showed the slightest regret. Neither happens. Not only are Bowker’s conception of these characters too two-dimensional to be believable, they’re also incredibly unlikable.
Flitting between these two fictional worlds is the family patriarch, Maurice Scott (Christopher Eccleston), Joe’s grandfather. The role seems tailored to Eccleston’s skills as an actor, offering both a serious-minded, well-meaning father who can’t remove himself from his childre’’s lives, and the sort to make snarky jibs on the situation, like Prospero mixed with a dash of Falstaff.
After the first episode, The A Word seems to be teetering between pretty decent and downright awful. If Bowker figures out how to give Nicola and Eddie hints of either believability or likability, that may tip the series’ scales to “pretty decent”. If not, it’ll continue to be a mess.