Since Netflix has helped spur the binge-watching pandemic, it’s become easier to immerse yourself in a world of online television and atrophy your brain into banana pudding. Not to be outdone, video streaming websites like Hulu and Amazon have entered the ring to create high-caliber original content. This is how the hilarious, smart and surprisingly intimate series Transparent was conceived.
Transparent focuses on Mort, played by Jeffery Tambor, who reaches a significant life change at the age of 68 when he transitions from male to female and prefers to live his life henceforth as Maura. Tambor brings a particular tenderness to his roles, even as George “No touching!” Bluth. His portrayal of Maura holds weight as she learns to present her real self to the world and her three self-absorbed children for the first time. “I don’t know how it is I raised three people who cannot see anything beyond themselves,” Maura says in an episode.
This mopey mishpucha also includes Sarah (Amy Landecker), a jaded mother and wife who’s stuck in an disappointing marriage and pines for her old college flame, Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), a petrified woman who goes to a seafood restaurant only to lament about the “tank full of lobsters just waiting to die”, and Josh (Jay Duplass), who moves through life between work as a music producer and sleeping with his clients with a blasé confidence. (Sidebar: are we supposed to always wear our shirts buttoned up all the way like that?)
Transparent comments on the boundaries and terrain of gender change without preaching or satirizing it. But the show is about much more than gender. It’s also about the real-life, jagged relationship between siblings that is based on mutual tolerance rather than acceptance, as well as what it means when someone says to “Man up” and how feel comfortable in your skin and within your community. It’s rough but it’s genuine. It’s remarkably sentimental but never less than intriguing.
Creator Jill Soloway, who has established her knack for documenting domestic unrest as a writer-director of several Six Feet Under episodes, has formulated a program that tiptoes effortlessly between themes outside of comedy and drama. Just because you can binge watch it doesn’t mean you should, it’s definitely something to savor.
The pilot episode of Transparent is streaming on Amazon and all ten episodes can be found on Amazon Prime.
Follow Emerson Malone on Twitter @allmalone