A cloud hangs over Jill Soloway’s dazzlingly intelligent and timely Amazon series. The show, which follows a transgender woman named Maura – played by Jeffrey Tambor – and her family, is known for its inclusive production methods, with Soloway implementing a “transfirmative action” programme that led to the employment of more than 80 transgender people. Then, in November, two of them – actor Trace Lysette and Tambor’s personal assistant called Van Barnes – accused Tambor of sexual harassment.
The actor denied the allegations, but quit the show nonetheless. The news seemed achingly ironic – Transparent fought hard in its storylines to challenge the dehumanisation and fetishisation of trans people, but has seemingly been blighted by those same evils. Strangely, it wasn’t impossible to picture the show continuing to thrive without its protagonist.
Transparent originally focused on Maura’s transition. She was the prism through which we witnessed the struggles of the transgender community: the familial rejection, the public abuse, the creepiness of some male suitors. But by series four, which aired in September, Maura was no longer the show’s centre of gravity. Instead, we wantonly dipped into the lives of her children and her transgender friends. Major storylines sprang up around a family holiday to Israel, the sex life of Maura’s eldest child, Sarah (played by Amy Landecker), and the inner turmoil of younger daughter, Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), whose gender dysphoria has been building since the second season.
That the show had to become narratively chaotic and greedy to stay thematically radical is a testament to wider social progress. The huge boost in visibility trans people have had in recent years means that Maura being transgender seems almost incidental, unlike when we first met her in 2014. It’s also proof of how staggeringly ambitious the show has become. Jewishness has long been hummed in the background on Transparent – the residual trauma of the Holocaust, the solace matriarch Shelly finds in the synagogue, son Josh’s rabbi fiancee – but by focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in series four the show confirmed its perverse dedication to fashioning binge-watchable television from the most contentious topics imaginable.
In that spirit, Transparent continued to prod at the restrictions imposed on all women by the modern world. By the end of the series, fortysomething mother Sarah had cemented her status as one of the most radical characters on TV. The elder Pfefferman’s dedication to identifying and satisfying her sexual urges goes against everything society says mothers are: this year we saw her attend therapy for sex addiction and joyfully begin a series of threesomes with her ex-husband and a woman she met there.
One of Soloway’s cleverest tricks was to make every member of the Pfefferman family terminally self-absorbed. The fact that Maura is a myopically selfish character with a long history of neglecting her kids means the potential for Transparent to end up a didactic mush of virtue-signalling is nullified. But the drama also fosters hardwearing empathy for the Pfeffermans. They look in, we look out. Transparent makes you care about structural inequality, prejudice and people in pain, whether you can summon an iota of affection for them or not. Because at its core, it’s a hugely optimistic show, about moving onwards and upwards despite trauma and unreliable allies. Hopefully, this brilliant series will be able to do the same.
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