The autism spectrum encompasses a group of developmental “disorders” that can impair and individual’s ability to communicate effectively or interact naturally in social scenarios. Despite the fact that millions of Americans are “on the spectrum,” those with conditions like autism and Aspergers are often underrepresented in films and television shows. That said, the first trailer for Netflix’s Atypical teases a fictional journey into a teen boy’s decidedly atypical life experience.
Released today, the two-minute spot follows Sam (Keir Gilchrist), an 18-year old autistic boy who — with a little encouragement from his therapist — decides to take a leap of faith and find himself a girlfriend. As you might expect, the trailer gets a bit sappy at times, but it packs plenty of the heartwarming awkwardness you’d expect from such a premise.
In fact, we get a prime example of it right out of the gate, as Sam casually drops that his therapist thinks he should “put himself out there and find someone to have sex with,” before correcting himself and admitting that he added “the sex part.”
On top of the trailer, the first poster for the series (below) was also released today and shows the visions of penguins that are apparently dancing in Sam’s head, along with the tagline: “Normal is overrated.” It also features the rest of his nuclear family, who — from left to right — seem reluctantly amused, genuinely perplexed, and vaguely concerned.
Speaking of the supporting cast, Michael Rapaport (Doug Gardner) seems to have a handle on the whole supportive-yet-confused-father thing and Oscar nominee Jennifer Jason Leigh (Elsa Gardner) seems equally adept at the supportive-yet-overbearing-mother thing.
Netflix has shown a penchant for tackling — if not untreaded — at least lightly treaded territory in the TV world. That said, we’re interested to see if the streamer can get past the stigma surrounding autism spectrum disorders the way that it got past the stigma surrounding physical disability in The Fundamentals of Caring (2016).
We’ll find out soon enough, as the show will be available to binge on come August 11. If you don’t feel like waiting until then, however, you can catch lead actor Gilchrist in HBO’s Room 104, which begins airing July 28.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?