After last week's article on the latest addition to Sesame Street 's already stellar cast and because this month (actually my birthday in particular) is known for autism awareness, I decided to further investigate autism on television because I want my future students and my future children to understand what an intellectual disability is, and that it's not like having leprosy. I want my students to see the world better than it is and accept people the way they are.

The first television was created in 1927, and within less than a year, a dramatic one-act play became the first thing ever to be broadcasted on television. Almost one hundred years later, hundreds of thousands of shows have aired on television ranging from comedies to talk shows, from dramas to news reports. Over the years, television has aired shows with various perspectives and characters such as race, religion, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. However, despite the extreme multitude of television broadcasts, there is a noticeable lack of representation in almost every single one of these broadcasts and that is the portrayal of an intellectual disability, specifically autism. Despite modern society’s progress toward the acceptance of intellectual and physical disabilities, there is still a long way to go, especially in the world of media. In a world full of technology and constant communication and connection to the internet, media leads the way to acceptance through leading by example. Television shows and movies have made societal advancements through portraying various races, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses, sexual orientations, and genders, they have made little to no advancement in the world of disability. It took Sesame Street forty-five years to create a character that shares similar characteristics with over 3.5 million people in the United States alone (Autism Speaks). It took Criminal Minds over 100 episodes before Dr. Spencer Reid became true friends with his colleagues and began to understand social interactions, however, even on recent episodes, he is still noted as the strange one. And despite the 228 episodes of The Big Bang Theory, there has still been no progress to accept Sheldon’s possible intellectual disability. When people watch movies or television, they often identify with one of the characters, however, a large population in our world has not been able to ever fully identify with a fictional character. This needs to change, and while Julia from Sesame Street is an excellent start, she is just a start in this movement to show diagnosed and acknowledged autism on the media through the use of fictional characters.