The portrayal of people with physical or mental disabilities on television has never been 100% accurate, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo is not without controversy.
The 2022 K-drama sparked many conversations upon airing its earliest episodes. Autistic people have been stigmatized as 'harmful' and 'shameful' for making their families suffer due to their disability, even in South Korea.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo follows Woo Young-woo, a 27-year-old autistic lawyer who graduates at the top of her class and lands her first job at Hanbada Law Firm, where she must learn to cope in an industry filled with prejudice against her disability.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo put their home network, ENA Channel, on the map by scoring 17.5% nationwide ratings overall.
The legal K-drama series also happened to have taken over Netflix’s Top 10 chart and garnered 77.4 million hours watched since landing on the streaming service last year.
In spite of its global success and popularity, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, like many previous controversial K-dramas, still faced backlash when it came to the series' representation of people on the Autism spectrum.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo: The Autism Stereotype
No matter how much a television series aims to bring representation into the media, the media presented will always have its limitations. Take Extraordinary Attorney Woo, for example.
Woo Young-woo, who possesses an IQ of 164, was diagnosed with level 1 Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the first episode of the K-drama.
In the earlier episodes of the series, many families who took care of autistic people among their members were quite disappointed in how ‘stereotypical’ Woo Young-woo’s autism was portrayed.
This was one of the many controversies the K-drama series faced in the earlier episodes they released, simply because Attorney Woo’s autism symptoms included the common ones.
Attorney Woo’s common symptoms include becoming overstimulated, having a meltdown when she was young, her hyper fixation on whales, safety food, and even hand stimming.
In one episode, Woo referred to her condition as high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome, which explains her difficulty in social interactions and repetitive behaviors such as echolalia (where she repeats the words spoken by someone else).
Aside from the ‘surface level’ representation of autism by Park Eun-bin’s Woo Young-woo role, many fans of the show believed that the series’ title is outrightly problematic.
Using ‘Extraordinary’ to describe Attorney Woo in the title alone was rendered problematic, because of its literal translation from Hangeul being ‘weird’, ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ lawyer Woo Young-woo.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo Creators’ Response To Show’s Criticisms
During a press conference last year, series director Yoo In-sik and series writer Moon Ji-won managed to address the controversies Extraordinary Attorney Woo faced since its debut.
First off, they were quick to address that they were aware of the fact that their viewers would have mixed reactions to the series, especially since their main goal was to ‘let viewers resonate with her’ as a character.
The director and writer also openly admitted to having done extensive research on the broadness of the autism spectrum’s characteristics.
The writer herself has even spent a whole year studying and speaking with an experienced special educator to shape the accuracy of the series.
Ultimately, their final word was really on how Autism’s diverse spectrum would not be easy to cover within just 16 episodes of the series.
Instead, they focused on how Attorney Woo fits as a protagonist in the story they were trying to mold, while also adding that there had been limitations in ‘incorporating other factors beyond that.’
Moon Ji-won even debunked how badly the title of the K-drama was received by the audiences, defending that the specific word, ‘extraordinary’ is not as bad as others are reading it out to be:
“The word ‘extraordinary’ could have held a negative connotation, referring to the unfamiliar, different or things you want to avoid. But there’s also the power to think creatively and to make our society better by being extraordinary.”
Extraordinary Attorney Woo: What’s the Verdict?
How a series is received would be highly dependent on the viewers themselves, which is what the Extraordinary Attorney Woo creators pointed out in making the K-drama in the first place.
While the series is still evidently flawed and lacking in the representation of how autistic people act, the series continues to receive praise and encouragement, enough even to produce an Extraordinary Attorney Woo Season 2 soon.
Hopefully, there will be more K-dramas that deal with a more diverse autism spectrum in the future, and even branch out to casting actual people with disabilities to make the show even more realistic than they intended it to be.
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