The original post: /r/television by /u/Anagoth9 on 2026-01-11 18:11:54+00:00.
There’s a lot of posts that get made about shows that wouldn’t work these days or that were products of their time. One of the examples I’ve been seeing with increased frequency is The Office, in part because people think Dwight was autistic and Jim was bullying him for his neurodivergent behavior.
Expert Dwight wasn’t autistic; he was Amish.
Or Mennonite. The show wasn’t consistent as to which. It was consistent in framing his behavior as a result of being raised on a farm in relative isolation by Germanic religious conservatives in rural Pennsylvania. It was a learned behavior rather than neurodivergence. He also thought that he was superior to everyone and would try to throw around an authority that he didn’t actually have, so Jim’s pranks were framed as more of a tit for tat rather than just bullying someone for being different. Which, I mean, you can still dislike or think is problematic if you want, but for different reasons.
Are there other shows that seem to have been misremembered or retconned by the public rather than officially retconned by the writers?