‘The Good Doctor’ goes viral amid criticism over how he portrays autism

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Dr. Shaun Murphy and Dr. Han in “The Good Doctor”. ABC Clips of medical drama “The Good Doctor” went viral in May. They sparked memes about the characters of Freddie Highmore and Daniel Dae Kim, Dr. Shaun Murphy and Dr. Han. The viral clips have also revived criticism of the show’s portrayal of autism.

Almost six years after “The Good Doctor” premiered on ABC in 2017, the medical drama has been thrust into the spotlight.

Snippets of the ABC drama went viral on Twitter on Tuesday, sparking new reviews and much discussion about the show’s central character. Dr. Shaun Murphy (played by Freddie Highmore) has autism, which in the series grants him supernatural medical abilities in a way that plays into the autistic scientist trope.

Here’s how “The Good Doctor” went viral, renewing a wave of discussion about the show’s portrayal of autism.

Clips from the show began posting on TikTok and Twitter in late April and early May.

It’s not unusual for seemingly random movies and TV shows to go viral thanks to TikTok. As Polygon recently reported, an entire corner of the social media platform is dedicated to downloading movies and TV clips, often with little or no context. “The Good Doctor” is one of those shows that airs on TikTok in little choppy chunks that often amass millions of views, often because they’re just goofy.

In late April, the show seemingly broke out of its corner of on-app confinement, primarily through a clip showing Murphy repeatedly insisting to Daniel Dae Kim’s character Dr. Han that he’s a surgeon.

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The footage is from season two, episode 17 of the show and went viral multiple times on TikTok in April first in an April 20 post by user @alilson_m which has 19.3 million views to date , and again in an April 22 post by user @hnjiaaju14, whose video has around 20.5 million views to date (both accounts are basically clip repositories for shows like “The Good Doctor” and “Grey’s Anatomy”).

On @hnjiauuju14’s post, the comments take a rather sardonic turn.

“Me when I’m a surgeon,” read one comment from early May. “I think he’s a surgeon,” reads another. “Bro might be a surgeon,” said another.

Meme parodies and montages of the footage that warp Highmore’s voice into a helium earwound and add lasers to Kim’s eyes have proliferated on TikTok. Other montages of fish clips imagined Highmore saying “I’m a sturgeon” rather than “surgeon”.

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Another clip from the show has circulated online, showing Murphy repeatedly abusing a transgender patient. After the clip was uploaded to TikTok on April 25 by TikTok user @xiaoshuai057, it was re-uploaded to Twitter by multiple accounts who made additional transphobic statements or sided with Murphy misinterpreting the patient.

The virality of ‘I am a surgeon’ has generated ironic fandom for Dr Han and fresh criticism of the show’s portrayal of autism

On May 6, screenwriter Guy Dolbey reposted @hnjiaajuz14’s upload of the clip to Twitter, where it has since been viewed an estimated 8.9 million times by users on the platform. The Twitter upload, in turn, sparked other memes, reactions and criticism.

After the “I am a surgeon” music video was posted on Twitter, memes about Dr. Han began to abound. People enthusiastically praising Dr. Han or making memes about him have become an ironic type of fandom.

Eventually, “The Good Doctor” memes were distilled into a singular conflict: Surgeon vs. Han, which was applied to other clips in the series.

The “I’m a surgeon” memes also collided with discussions of the separate transgender child clip on the show, with one person reposting the upload by @CatchUpFeed with the caption “NO SURGEON!”

As the memes about “The Good Doctor” spiraled out of control, with users sharing other absurd snippets from the show, others criticized and made jokes about the show’s portrayal of people with autism.

This criticism is not new. In 2018, a group of three doctors wrote in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter that the show continued a trend of portraying autism as some sort of “superpower,” mostly through genius white, male characters like the licensed physician. In the process, it leaves behind people with autism who don’t fit that portrayal, they argued.

And amid the upsurge in criticism, Sara Luterman, a 19th-century care reporter who wrote about the show for Slate in 2017, told The Washington Post in May that while she felt positive about the show during from its premiere, she has since realized that there were other series with “better, fuller, more realistic shows of people with autism.”

On Twitter, some clips shared poked fun at how “The Good Doctor” portrayed Murphy’s autism, with one person referencing the dramatized way charts and medical information surround him as he thinks “powers autism” by Murphy.

Others pointed to the show’s association with Autism Speaks, an organization that has been criticized for perpetuating harmful narratives about autistic people and failing to properly serve or represent them. Many have raised concerns that Highmore, the actor who plays Dr. Murphy, is not autistic.

While “The Good Doctor” has aired for years, this particular viral moment seems to mean a whole host of people online are becoming aware of network TV, as Bethy Squires wrote for Vulture. And while the memes have died down, “The Good Doctor” will continue to blow for at least a seventh season, and maybe more.

A representative for ABC did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.

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