“Transparent” might be out to challenge and change societal assumptions on gender fluidity and genre rigidity but the show has become something of a fixed mainstay for its producer and distributor Amazon Studios, the creative content division of Amazon.com
AMZN, -0.44%
which has experienced a high show turnover.
With its fourth season streaming Friday on Amazon Prime, the comedy-drama has become Amazon’s longest-running series. The show revolves around the exploits of the Pfefferman family and Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a transgender divorced father of three.
“Transparent,” created by Jill Soloway, has ambitious aims. “We do feel like we’re trying to make the world a better place,” says Jay Duplass, who plays troubled son Josh Pfefferman. “It’s almost like a joke to say it out loud because it sounds naive but we’re attempting no less than that.”
Tambor is keen to highlight the influence of “Transparent” on the recent content-streaming boom. “I think people are seeing what Jill [Soloway] has done and it has encouraged other people who have projects that are creative to come over to streaming,” Tambor tells MarketWatch. “When I was first asked to do this, some of my friends would say, ‘What are you doing? Do they pay you?’”
“Now actors, directors and talent are coming over because not only can they get their stories told but they are told in a novelistic way where they don’t have to cue up to commercials or come down in any way,” he says. “That’s a revolution. If I was a network executive, I would say, ‘What is going on?’”
Israel
What is going on in season four of “Transparent” is that the Jewish Pfefferman family go to Israel, adding the Middle East to the various conflicts chronicled in the show.
“’Transparent’ thinks about how boundaries can be used to keep people safe or not,” says Soloway. “We said this line in season 2 or 3: ‘What if your boundary is my trigger?’ That happens with people and it happens with countries. People think that Israel is about ‘Jewish/ Not Jewish’ or ‘Palestinian/ Israeli.’ You get there and you’re like, ‘None of those things stand.’ There are Arab Christians. There are Beduoins fighting in the Israeli army. There are no simple binaries.”
Soloway adds she was interested in exploring the concept of the Israeli “religious left” comprising gay rabbis and liberal Jews.
“Everybody I know is getting a little bit more spiritual right now trying to understand what is real and what matters and trying to heal from what feels like this giant wound,” she says. “For me going to Israel almost felt like the only answer, this actual piece of land where all of this conflict has its roots… Trump is trying to rouse up Islamophobia to get people to believe that it’s their Christian duty to murder. What better place to go than Jerusalem to go, ‘How did this start?’”
It’s about us. It’s about family. Stream the new season of #TransparentTV 9/22 with Prime. pic.twitter.com/MbWuw9Qucu
— Transparent (@transparent_tv) July 28, 2017
Trump
Although “Transparent” doesn’t explicitly feature takedowns of the current U.S. presidency, it might be the most anti-Trump show out there.
“The show creates an ecosystem where tolerance is prioritized,” says Soloway. “An openly misogynist, awful man beat a highly qualified woman and did so after a highly qualified African-American president ran things with a sense of beauty and grace where we all felt really proud and assumed that forward movement meant tolerance and modernity.”
“Transparent” cast members differ in their attitudes toward Trump.
“I think Donald Trump has done us a great favor — he has no idea how helpful he has been, nor the people that support him, in highlighting the need to be inclusive,” says veteran transgender actress Alexandra Billings, who plays Davina, a mentor to Maura.
Actress Gaby Hoffmann says she wishes the president would watch “Transparent” for sadistic reasons. “If I thought watching anything could change the heart and mind of this person I would have a lot more hope than I do,” she says. “But sure, it would be a torture chamber for him.”
Trump’s recent transgender military ban has hardened the show’s creative team’s stance. “For Trump to use things like a trans ban in the military is for him to take a kind of conservative, fundamentalist religious belief about humans which is that there is no gender besides male or female,” says Soloway. “These people are not humans who should not be able to serve in the army? This is craziness.”
Tambor adds that “It makes me go a little bit faster because that’s just nonsense. Although we don’t talk about the election, it’s very much in our season.”
Family
Irrespective of Trump, “Transparent” has also changed the way families are depicted on screen in television. “I think it has opened up that concept of the chosen family a little bit more,” says transgender actress Trace Lysette who plays Shea. “It’s powerful that a show like this can be streamed into the homes and computers of millions of people and create that dialogue in their head of acceptance of people’s differences and thinking outside the norm.”
Judith Light, who plays Maura’s ex-wife Shelly, notes of “Transparent,” “It’s had a dynamic [effect] at an unconscious level in people. When they see the show, people say, “OK the content isn’t the same — I don’t have a transgender person in my family — but I do have someone who came to the family and said either, ‘I’m gay or I’m not the person you thought I was’ and it sends a shift that happens within the structure of the family. I don’t know if we’ve seen that kind of dynamic in a structure this way.”
Amazon’s future
“Transparent” seems immune to Amazon Studios’ recent creative upheavals that have seen shows canceled and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly on the hunt for the next “Game of Thrones”. Soloway recently renewed her deal with Amazon Studios and co-created “I Love Dick”.
“We’re the Jewish queer ‘Game of Thrones’ on Amazon because we’re like, ‘Who survives?’, says Landecker. “People always end up having to leave because their relationships are so temporary and [referencing a “Transparency” pregnancy subplot] we’re now ‘The Handmaid’s Tale!’”
But the fluidity and flux of the show’s plot and process seemingly extends to “Transparent’s” relationship with Amazon. “There are only a couple of people at the top that you have to answer to,” says Light. “You don’t have this conglomerate to talk to about what you have to do or get permission for things. It’s much simpler.”
