Girls also deals with dysfunctional characters, but they're not autistic, or old – they're modern New Yorkers.
He also said he felt he had "met" the program's dysfunctional characters while working as a producer for the long-running drama "E.R.," which was set in Chicago.
Is it important for Anderson to have that sense of normality, that film family surrounding him, in order to take on such dysfunctional characters?
Tennessee Williams used a fire escape in "The Glass Menagerie" to suggest both literal and symbolic escape for his dysfunctional characters whose St . Louissetting typifies urban America.
On the surface, it could feel like these modern TV romcoms – with their crude humour, gratifyingly dysfunctional characters and unduly complex trajectories – are simply offering a cosmetic update.
It is run by a neurotic crew of seriously dysfunctional characters, who are determined to find love for their clients, even although they don't have much success in romance when it comes to their own lives.
The play's group of dysfunctional characters, utterly alien to the prevailing middle-class "anyone for tennis?" school of theatre, each explored their chances of attaining a glimpse of happiness.
It has a gamboling story line involving a television channel called Hot Air Cable, a reality show about ballooning and marriage that is set in Las Vegas, and a gaggle of whimsically dysfunctional characters with names like Bubbles and Honey.
The driving and shooting is fun, but the real star of the game is the city itself, rendered with a loving sense of decay and populated with perhaps the best cast of dysfunctional characters to grace a pixel.
Except for that unfortunate blind spot about handsome killers, Kinsey proves herself a shrewd observer of the dysfunctional characters who make up the not-so-happy households that are disrupted when Dowan Purcell, administrator of the Pacific Meadows nursing home, goes missing.
Like Shameless, it is centred around a group of vividly dysfunctional characters, but this time you might expect them to be rather more disciplined: they're a team of Manchester cops, tackling "drug labs, arsonists, neo-Nazis and notorious murderers", according to Channel 4, who will be screening it in 2015.
