The fall’s best new series isn’t on broadcast television, it isn’t on cable, and it even isn’t on Netflix.
Sponsored by the company that began as an online bookstore, “Transparent,” which began streaming its first 10 episodes Friday on Amazon Prime, is by far the best thing you’ll see on a small screen this fall.
Like so many comic actors before him, Jeffrey Tambor shows an extra depth as a retired professor who finally decides to tell his grown children that he would prefer to dress and be seen as a woman. Tambor’s worn a dress for comic effect before, in “Hill Street Blues” and “Arrested Development,” but in Jill Soloway’s nuanced, deeply felt series, he truly becomes Maura, such that when he dresses in his male attire, in flashbacks or until he comes clean with his kids, he seems truly uncomfortable.
What might be a one-note gag in other hands is instead part of a complex family story that is so lucidly and realistically depicted by the ensemble, it’s a series that lends itself well to the binge nature of streaming.
Every one of the Fefferman family, we learn, are dealing with their own issues of what is real in their life and whether they are living up to it. Amy Landecker, as the eldest daughter, has her suburban life shaken when she rekindles a past torch with a college flame, in what she thought was lesbian experimentalism. Jay Duplass, a writer/director in his own right, has his own problems trying to get more serious with a young, wispy singer he is producing, while hiding another longterm relationship.
Talented Gaby Hoffman, who stole the show as Adam’s troubled sister on “Girls,” has even more problems here as she tries to find her way in the world, while trying to indulge herself in a number of different areas. The cast is packed with delights, with Judith Light as Tambor’s ex-wife, with her own set of problems in her current elderly relationship.
It’s Tambor, though, who is the initial revelation.
As he told reporters at the TV critics’ press tour last month, two days after his 70th birthday, “This this is probably the most transforming experience I’ve had — and had such depth! It also shows how far television has gone in terms of content, and this is far more leveled and centered. And I feel very honored in bringing forth this whole this whole subject.”
The role, he said, “is all I’ve ever wanted to do as an actor.”
For her part, Soloway says she tries to find her way with the complicated Fefferman family the way she did with the Fisher family as part of the writing staff on “Six Feet Under.” “We’d kind of listen to them — and it’s the same with the Feffermans.”
But something is different from that HBO series, she added. ” I love subverting the Disney trope of a parent who dies in the first five minutes and, again, ‘Six Feet Under,’ the dad dying in the first five minutes. I just had the thought of what would happen if a parent died because a new parent was born, what it would mean to mourn a parent while you are getting to meet a new one.
“It’s this great mythological structure, a loss of a parent,” Soloway said. “And I just thought: subvert it with the loss and a birth at the same time.”
She said she was thinking “mythologically and politically and spiritually about a missing father: the idea of a wounded father replaced by a blossoming femininity.
“It just felt like really, really fertile place for drama and for comedy. And transness suddenly is really in the zeitgeist in a great way that makes us feel like we are really pointing in the right direction. But the ideas about gender freedom that the show promotes are really sort of about freedom and transitioning and transcendence and becoming whoever you want to be outside of the idea of sexuality or gender.”
It’s good enough to make you a subscriber of yet another streaming service that is worth it.
And then they give you free shipping too.