Cast: Ella Maisy Purvis as patience, Laura Fraser as Bea, Mark Benton as Calvin, Ali Ariaie as Will, Nathan Welsh as Jake

Network: PBS

Length: 6 episodes

Audio Description Provided By:

Written by:

Narrated By:

What Is it?: Patience is a young British woman pulled in to help the detectives after they begin to notice she has a strong attention to detail. This is due to Patience being neurodivergent, and she is being looked after and supported by many in her life, including a group for individuals like her. A detective decides to take a swing at using Patience as a civilian consultant, and works various cases with her as the series progresses.

What Works: Patience is charming, not just the character, but the show. The character is brought to life by Ella Maisy Purvis, a rising neurodivergent talent herself, who provides authenticity to her character, not to mention a warmth and intelligence to sustain being the lead of a show. She certainly has her moments where the world becomes too much for her, and she has to stop when overwhelmed, but the show largely doesn’t lean on whaat Patience can’t do, or suggest something is wrong with her, and instead supports the idea that she has far more to contribute because she is able to put puzzles together no one else seems able to follow. the show follows a trend of procedurals we’ve been doing for quite some time, with quirky characters involved in investigations that perhaps wouldn’t normally be. Stateside, this niche thrives with shows like Elzabeth, High Potential, and poker Face as standouts, but it has been going on for a long time. This isn’t even the first time an autistic character has been roped in, but it might be the one with the most thoughtful representation.

British shows don’t run enough episodes to really get a show going, or to build up the ensemble, so most of this cast could disappear between season 1 and 2, and i wouldn’t notice. I would miss Bea (Laura Fraser), who is the de facto partner to patience. She’s funny and warm, and suggest almost a maternal energy the show insists Patience missed in her growing up.

the cases were each varying levels of interesting, though none were boring. The season finale was a little more tense, since more is at stake,but I can really only be just so attached to characters I’ve spent only six episodes with. I know for the Brits, this is business as usual, but here, we got used to 22 episode seasons. Even streaming originals usually have 8 or 10 episode seasons.

With all of that, it is a credit to the writers and the actors for pulling me in, because I haven’t completed a season of a PBS drama in a while.

what Doesn’t Work: Again, the length, and the attempted breadth of the ensemble work against it. I didn’t feel like I knew everyone. Bea isn’t the only detective, and we have Patience’s support group, and her guardian as side characters needing development. Guardian is a strong word, I just can’t remember how he knows Patience, but he’s not her father. It’s things like that we could explore with even a standard streaming season of 8-10 episodes. I think the streamers found the sweet spot, and we’re seeing a lot more shows comfortable with shorter runs as a result. but this does still feel too short.

The Audio Description: Support your local PBS station because they create content with audio description. oh, you think I just HAPPENED to review a PBS show? out of nowhere? that’s cute. No, Patience is just a vessel by which to remind people that the content on these services is pretty widely accessible. there’s nothing divisive about this, it takes no political stance, and it provides fairly safe and interesting content to viewers, even blind ones, for no cost to us. the idea that there’s no value in PBS, or that it is some left leaning propaganda machine is silly. this is a crime procedural, the same shit they’ve been doing since Columbo. Hell, there were radio plays like this before TV was even a thing. People have been consuming these detective stories before there ever was a MAGA, or Trump, and PBS has quite a few shows like this. Support PBS. There was one time in the audio description in episode six where it felt totally Ok saying a boy had a reptile on his shoulder. Like, were you really unsure? Would you have allowed a scene to describe “a boy and his mammal?” I can understand maybe with birds or fish, but with reptiles… you should be able to distinguish if it’s at least some kind of lizard or snake. they look very different.

Why You might Like It: You like crime procedurals. You also are an Anglophile.

Why You Might Not Like It: the serious answer would be because six episodes is too short, but honestly, most people probably tuned out because of a preconceived notion about what kinds of shows are on PBS. either stuffy British period dramas, or woke nonsense. This is neither of those.

Final Thoughts: While Patience isn’t much different from a dozen shows on air now, like those shows it is driven by a charming lead performance by Ella Maisy Purvis, and a desire to support PBS.

Fresh: 7.4/10