The first season of the Netflix series “Atypical” introduced audiences to the Gardners, a suburban Connecticut family with an autistic teenage son, Sam (Keir Gilchrist), at its center. As an autistic viewer, the coming-of-age story inspired familiar frustrations for me with how the disability is usually represented in popular culture: white, cisgender, straight, intellectually gifted and totally lacking in human empathy.

It doesn’t take someone particularly adept at social niceties to realize that you shouldn’t dump your girlfriend and immediately declare your undying love for your therapist in front of her entire family, but Sam did just that. He also yanked a girl’s ponytail (instead of just moving away) because it was bothering him, and asked another peer to be his “practice girlfriend” in order to learn the ropes of dating. By the end of the season, it felt to me that regardless of the intentions of the creator Robia Rashid, “Atypical” was a step backward in onscreen autistic depictions.

And so I was pleasantly surprised to find that in its second season, “Atypical” improves on the first in significant ways. Sam is now in his senior year and his decision to go to art school breaks the mold a little — usually, autistic adults in films and TV shows get pigeonholed as programmers, scientists or math whizzes, as seen in “Adam,” “The Good Doctor” and of course, “Rain Man.” In his peer group of autistic teens, we get an even wider variety of aspirations. One wants to be a dentist. Another loves ambulances and would, perhaps, be a wonderful EMT or ambulance driver someday. I have an MFA in creative writing — most of us aren’t Bill Gates or Sheldon Cooper of “The Big Bang Theory,” and it was nice to see that acknowledged here.

Season 2 corrects another major problem from Season 1: The framing of Sam, and, by extension, his autism, as the forces tearing his family apart. Instead, it is his mother’s infidelity and his sister’s self-sabotaging streak that take center stage; Elsa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) desperately seeks forgiveness from her husband, Doug (Michael Rapaport). Casey (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) struggles to adjust to private school life and her evolving sexuality. Each member of the family has his or her own engrossing story, and this time, refreshingly, Sam and his autism aren’t portrayed as the source of their misery.