Transparent - Jill Solloway television series on Amazon

maura is also a self-centered asshole! everyone on this show is a self-centered asshole! but likeable and human all the same.

(PS one of the daughters (Ali/Gaby Hoffmann) was the little girl on Field of Dreams! kinda blew my mind when i realized that)

Not only that, but her IRL mom is Warhol Superstar/Actress (Midnight Cowboy, Play It Again, Sam) Viva!

I plowed through all of the episodes last week. Love it. Judith Light! Much Jewish!

I watched the pilot and I felt like it was well-written and acted but I didn't want to spend any more time with the characters, especially the kids.

otm

Yeah, I can only stand Ali, and even she gets on my nerves sometimes too. I think the assholeishness of the other two siblings is supposed to be balanced by their wisecracks, but I don't share their sense of humor so that their attempted jokes just add to their crappiness.

Still pumped about another season though, it's a great show

Yeah I didn't find them all that funny. I think I'm just not in the mood right now for yet another show about a family of wisecracking assholes. I could totally see enjoying it at a different point in my life, and can see how someone else would enjoy it.

something about the way they seemed to luxuriate in their behavior too, I just felt like "yes, there are people like this in the world, and yes, this is a skilled portrayal of them, but I just don't need them in my life right now"

I'd encourage you to check out another episode or two, though, because I had a very similar reaction to the characters in the pilot and still ended up liking the show quite a bit.

yeah, woman alive likes the show a lot, is ahead of me, I'll probably give it more time

they're all assholes but i loved the season despite/because of that.

^

totally overrated show. good/great acting by most of the leads (though mom = terrible), but such hokey writing, from the lesbians to the "ho ho ho jews and their schmear", characters reduced to caricature except when saved by individual actors' performances.

^
xp

"ho ho ho jews and their schmear",

that was silly and too on-the-nose, but i appreciated the general Jew-yness.

I did find some of the loljews humor in the first ep to be kinda played out, think that was part of what turned me off.

as a ho ho jew, it felt fairly dead on to me

loving this to death. just watched ep 8, different from the rest so far [don't want to spoiler anyone], very very excellent.

but BRADLEY WHITFORD!!

On Saturday, for 24 hours only, Amazon is making all eps of this available to stream free to all customers.

Tom Leger is apt here about some of the reasons I feel extremely wary about this series and Solloway: https://storify.com/meauxdal/jill-soloway-and-bruce-jenner

discovering that solloway's dad is trans suggests a lot about the perspective and intent of the series to me

That may be true, but even leaving aside this last faux pas and my concerns about Solloway casting a cis man to play a trans woman, we're not exactly lacking for cis narratives about middle-class white people transitioning that mostly speak to cis concerns. That it sounds like Transparent adds to that glut is probably inevitable given the economics of producing a tv series, but it doesn't make me any more inclined to engage with the show, especially given the more challenging work by trans writers that's been coming out of small presses like Topside over the last few years (Katherine Cross has written about some of those developments here: http://bitchmagazine.org/article/know-tell-trans-women-literary-fiction-nonfiction-writing-publishing). Anyway, I can't fairly judge this series without watching it, and I don't begrudge you your enjoyment of it, so I'll stay out of this thread.

better yet: watch a few episodes and see what you think!
and yeah, i would also certainly welcome a non-cis perspective narrative series made for television; maybe the success of transparent will lead that direction in the next few years

Yeah, point taken: whatever my misgivings, I'll try to approach the series with an open mind when I eventually get around to watching a few episodes. (A non-ILX friend whose judgment I trust described it as decently written, despite her ambivalence about its casting and whiteness and class focus.)

the complints re: race/class stuff is understandable but the show goes into more depth re cultural/religious identity w/r/t Judaism than I was expecting, and I think it deserves some points for that

I watched the pilot and I felt like it was well-written and acted but I didn't want to spend any more time with the characters, especially the kids.

Yeah, otm. We're taking a break between seasons of "The Americans," so my wife suggested it, based on buzz/acclaim. As I watched it I was worried she might be into it, because I hated everyone, but thankfully at the end she turned to me and basically said she hated it and didn't like anyone and that she just couldn't relate to anyone or any of their problems and particularly their pervasive selfish unfunny assholery. I may make her watch another ep, to be fair, but frankly between this show and a general disinterest in revisiting "Orange is the New Black," I'm happy to be able to knock a few series off of our collective must-see list.

not meaning to make this a thing but the "i don't like these characters" argument always loses me. i can get "i find these situations / the directorial eye and intent appalling" but they're actors in parts; whether I like them or not is totally secondary to the reliability of the narrator and the creative skill of the whole team

i feel certain there must be a thread about this somewhere.

the characters in this are no less likeable than the characters in arrested development, i think.

it definitely gets better, and deeper, as it goes along.

Unlikeable characters in ridiculous comedits like AD or Curb I can get behind. But I find it tougher in ostensibly reality based drama.

Comedies, sorry.

Conversely you could say it's a failure of the creative team to make these unlikeable characters compelling. Obviously I love lots of assholes and narcissistic peeps on TV, so it's not that it's always bad.

I don't know, I found the characters compelling enough, and I thought it was a very well-written series, but I'm judging it on the whole season and not the first episode or so.

For me, it's that their unlikeable traits are presented as adorable or sassy (the Californication problem), and just their straight-up meanness seems hack-y and easy rather than an attempt to dig deeper. (I've heard it gets better too though)

Yeah, that was exactly the problem we had, that the show sort of smugly double-downed on these unlikeable character traits, like they were supposed to be funny or even endearing rather than just abrasive or obnoxious. I admit it's a really tough call, when to stick it out, and so many shows improve after the pilot, or after the first few episodes, or even after the first season (this one has already been picked up for two more seasons, right?). Perhaps expectations were too high for this one, since we've heard nothing but good things, to such an extent that we were sort of left scratching our heads.

Sorry, but that strikes me as a terribly misguided reason not to watch anything, unless you're looking for more passive entertainment (and it's totally cool if you are, obviously). But the supposition that likeable characters makes a show good needs to be questioned from the beginning, especially here where none of the kids are supposed to be likable: they're flawed, frustrating, self-destructve, extremely selfish assholes, and the nuances of that are what make them good characters, and make the show interesting.

Again, there's probably a thread on this, but the idea that the default setting is that you should be able to relate, that identification should be as smooth and pleasurable as possible, strikes me as ????

But the supposition that likeable characters makes a show good needs to be questioned from the beginning, especially here where none of the kids are supposed to be likable: they're flawed, frustrating, self-destructve, extremely selfish assholes, and the nuances of that are what make them good characters, and make the show interesting.

I agree with this. They are unlikeable and deeply flawed characters, but I still find them - or their individual narratives - interesting.

Oh, it's not a default setting at all, at least not for us. There is nothing we watch just to watch something, simply as boob-tube "what's on?" escapism. We have to be interested and invested, at least to some degree, and yeah, entertained, too, not least because we have limited time to sit around watching anything. Obviously like all art it's ultimately personal, because like I posted a few inches back, there is plenty I watch, have watched, have read, etc., with flawed or otherwise unlikeable characters, often to an extreme, but I've still soldiered on, often to great reward. This show, we were struck by just how much it rubbed both of us the wrong way. Like, I know folks who can't stand "Seinfeld" for the same reason, and that's fine. These folks were a very particular strain of ugly that we just couldn't take. Again, it's the kind of unlikeable they are, the kind where I suspect you're supposed to find them kooky, or funny, or some other appealing eccentric quality that helps you get past their horrible personalities. But we didn't sync up with that. I suppose it's all about how the story is told, then.

The father's story was the most compelling on every front, but every time a kid showed up, let alone opened their mouth, we were just ... ugh. I mean, Tambor's character literally says something along the lines of "I can't believe I raised such selfish, horrible children," so I can only assume the show will be partly about their transition too, in a sense.

It's like books. I usually finish every book I begin, but every once in a while there's a book I hate so much I just can't do it. Like, recently I read a third of 'The Making of Zombie Wars,' by Aleksandar Hemon, and it was so bad that I eventually just had to stop. TV I guess is even more cutthroat, because (sorry 21st century) we only watch it on an actual TV, around the same time block, as available. Unlike a movie, which is only 2 or so hours long, or a book, which we can take with us wherever we go, several hours of a show is a much bigger commitment for us.

"I suspect you're supposed to find them kooky, or funny, or some other appealing eccentric quality that helps you get past their horrible personalities."

I dunno, I'm not sure I did or do, at least not in the way vharacters on, say, Girls, are totally fucking tedious, but you're still supposed to find them "cute."

"I can only assume the show will be partly about their transition too, in a sense."

Maybe I'm misreading the comment, but I'm again curious: why this need for redemption, or any kind of coming to self-consciousness? I think if anything, the show goes further into ~why~ they're fucked up - to have them come to and suddenly redeem themselves and earn the viewers sympathy would a) betray the characters themselves (especially since they seem to not learn from their mistakes) and b) just be lazy and easy narrative, no? I mean, most real people aren't likeable, why should fictional people be?

Anyways, not to push the point, I really liked the show, but my main problem with it is that it (and I haven't read this thred pre-revive, so forgive my potential repetitions) seems largely unaware of/unreflective on/unconcerned with the pre-conditions for the whole narrative it depicts, which is that Mort/Maura is a wealthy white person with familial support and without financial or occupational dependences. Granted, I'm not sure the show's prerogative is to represent "the average" trans experience, or is necessarily obliged to show the common struggles of most trans persons (which go well beyond [SEMI-SPOILER] being harassed in a bathroom once and falling out with your bigoted friend), which brings the show dangerously close to the kind of played out, voyeuristic "rich people have problems too!" thematic of a lot of recent tv (cf. 6 feet under, which I believe Jill Solloway wrote), and at the risk of just reproducing the invisibility of the kind of trans experience they don't even acknowledge in the slightest. Again, this raises the question of whether a show can just be what it is or has an of obligation to faithfully represent the topic it represents, or alternately that is projected upon it (it may not claim to stand for the whole of trans experience - impossible in any case - but people might view it as such?). I dunno, in this caitlyn jenner moment, I'd like to have seen it express a little more self-consciousness about how it presents itself.

"rich people have problems too!"

I genuinely feel like this show's characters are like the characters in Arrested Development, though treated more in a Little Miss Sunshine vibe than the jokapalooza that AD did. Obvs AD didn't have the Trans theme, but I almost feel that's subservient to the overall theme of spoiled rich kids behaving badly, albeit learning some kind of sensitivity or knowledge of their own awfulness as the show progresses.

I can identify with your feeling, Josh, I gave up on Mad Men after the first couple of episodes because I hated all the characters (but then picked it up again a couple of years later) - but I didn't hate these weirdos so much as find their flaws and foibles interesting - or if not interesting, I wanted to see where they would lead them.

Also, I have loved Tambor since Hill Street Blues and would watch him in anything. Also my partner loved it and it came online shortly after our daughter was born and all we could do in life was stream!

I found a certain aspect of these characters instantly familiar and recognizable, and I assumed it was the Jewish family vibe, but maybe it's just the selfishness.

for me, i assumed it was both

There's nothing wrong with dislikeabke characters at all. But at some point in the early 00s, random meanness just became the comedy norm, and I think to some extent meanness is a lazy writer's crutch, and it's easier to write characters who are too mean to connect, because monologue is just a lot easier to write than dialogue, and (as Twitter will show you) it's a lot easier to write something mean than to write something interesting.

But on the other hand I only watched 1.5 episodes so I'll try again.

Little Miss Sunshine vibe

I certainly wouldn't expect change or redemption from these characters (x-post), but if they stay the way they are in episode one then I probably made the right decision cutting and running. Because -

why should fictional people be?

Episode two was a bit better, but I'm still blown away by the show's smug insistence that the kids and their lives are remotely as compelling as the dad's story. The father's story is great, but two eps in it's presented almost as a supporting story to the kids, but it really should be the other way around. it's almost like an exercise: let's take three supporting narcissists and make them the wise-cracking, ridiculous center. Every time they cut from the dad it immediately dead drops into silly sitcom/dramedy conventionality. May say as much about Solloway as anything else, tbh.

OTOH, I have been enjoying pretending it's a secret spin-off of "Parenthood." Like, there's a big reveal at the end that they're all best friends with Sarah Braverman.

I've watched 7 eps since Friday night. I love this and Tambor is AMAZING. The Maura flashbacks are great and the one where she and the guy she met in the bookstore revealed themselves to each other - omg that got me right in the heart.
Great little details too - Ali wearing a Fire Island sweatshirt (they referenced FI in dialogue too!), the oldest sister singing a psychedelic furs song in a flashback. I also really love the opening credits. Will probably finish this today. "Four out of five Pfeffermands now prefer pussy."

Oh and idk who she is but the lady playing Tammy is hot.

huh so now tambor is saying he's not leaving?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/arts/television/jeffrey-tambor-transparent.html

Jeffrey Tambor has been fired from #Transparent following sexual harassment claims https://t.co/PMFr5TE8UB pic.twitter.com/gKZjzLebAP

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) February 15, 2018

I feel like this show has an eerie resonance in the Trump era, the flashbacks to Nazi germany subtly warning "Watch out, society may not react as well as you think to this." No idea if that was the intent, but thought of it when I saw this.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15894729_351162891933205_724570151774816065_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=16d31eac3026c14c1789a49ec04165e4&oe=5C48EC3F

Han Koehle
January 4, 2017
This photo is usually divorced from its specific content. It is the most famous image of Nazi book burning. Most people assume the specific books don't matter. The horror is at the notion of destroying books, any books, which I can certainly understand. But let's talk about what was in them anyway.

This image shows Nazi-aligned vigilantes (not just government agents) destroying the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. Hirschfeld was the founder of modern transgender theory, and it is his displaced students who founded transgender advocacy in the US. Destroying this library destroyed the first central hub of transgender advocacy in the world. This loss is not an inconvenience. Parts of that library can never be replaced.

In the 1910s Earl Lind read one of the books from that library and wrote for a feminist magazine that mothers ought to raise their trans children according to their endorsed gender (as Lind said, their "mental sex"). One hundred years ago there was a movement to normalize trans people. It was based on scientific study and the assertion that the policies of a just society should be based on sound evidence, and sound evidence showed that gender variance was perfectly natural and perfectly healthy. That movement is what was displaced when Nazis stormed the library and burned all the books they found.

We recovered from the loss of Hirschfeld's collection, eventually. We are once again at a place where people write to feminist journals extolling parents (no longer mothers!) to raise their trans children according to the genders of their hearts. But suppressing trans existence is so visible at the heart of the party that just came to power in this country. We'll see what happens next.

Source:
Stryker, Susan (2008). Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press.

Edit (10/22/18): over the last 24 hours this post has been attracting attention again. I'm so saddened that this feels so relevant as the administration seeks to legislate trans people out existence. We remember. We #WontBeErased.

where was that posted?

facebook

absolutely brutal review of Soloway's memoir

The truth is, Soloway appears to know little more about trans people now than when she began production on Transparent. She Wants It suggests that when she wrote the show’s pilot, Soloway thought of trans women like her parent as little more than crossdressing men, and the lessons conducted by writer and series consultant Jennifer Finney Boylan (and subsequently trotted out by Soloway on her book tour) are appallingly basic:

The word “trans” is Latin for “bridge,” she taught us next. Then she wrote the word “transbrella” on the whiteboard. “Not everyone is at one end of the spectrum or the other,” she explained. “People use the word trans to refer to all kinds of people, including drag queens, butch lesbians, and genderqueer folks, who metaphorically stand on the bridge, in the middle, rather than using it to cross from one side to the other.

As far as I can tell, the hideous portmanteau transbrella is of Soloway’s own inventing. (Boylan likely used the usual term trans umbrella.) “Bridge,” meanwhile, is a spurious translation of the Latin word trans, which is a common preposition meaning “across.” Evidently no one at Random House could be bothered to crack open the old Wheelock. Do bridges go across things? They do. May one go across a bridge? Reader, this cannot be denied. But I hope, for Boylan’s sake at least, that the Transparent team was told that trans may be thought of as being like a bridge, for pedagogical purposes. This would have been a metaphor, a word which comes from the Greek metaphero, meaning “I carry across”—for instance, across a bridge.

https://www.affidavit.art/articles/no-one-wants-it?fbclid=IwAR3WSqSdCd5uIgAULkBz9ZzkkkA63OtZ-d_aYivujo-VzCOQK9THP8626O0

any word on whether the show is ever coming back? I heard soloway is doing a stage musical based on the mother and Jesus Christ Superstar.

no idea. tbh I never caught the last season and I wasn't that tempted to, even though I actually liked the previous one a fair bit

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/10/amazons-transparent-will-finally-return-as-a-musical

sounds bad

I really liked this show, and it had some wonderful moments, but I am fine if the last season was the last season

From that review Simon posted:

If a Mafia analogy seems crude to you, hold that thought. “I needed to find out why she was going straight to the press with her story, to understand why she hadn’t come to us,” Soloway writes of Lysette. “We could handle this, I wanted to tell her, but let us do it internally, inside the family.” Soloway is never so sulky as in these pages, pouting about her “legacy” and losing any lingering ability to complete sentences: “If Trace released a statement, it would be over for Jeffrey. And that meant Maura. The show. Our TV family. Everything.” In a climactic, chapter-ending scene, Soloway parlays with Lysette at a Coffee Bean picnic table. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she tells the actress. “Well, it happened to me,” Lysette coolly replies. What happens next is so incredible that I must quote it at length:

“I had to tell my story,” she said. “But I said in my statement that I wanted the show to continue.”
“But the idea of the show will be tarnished now in everyone’s minds,” I said. “In Middle America when people think of trans people there’s still so much suspicion, and Maura became this beautiful symbol of transness and now you’re laying this imagery out there of her being a predator.”
Suddenly, I started crying.
She was horrified.
“I’m the victim here and YOU’RE crying?” she demanded.
She was right. I was sitting across from her, frozen with fear. I tried to stop myself from crying. Like Michael in The Godfather, I tried to play it stoic and cool. I didn’t say, Fredo, after all I’ve done for you. I said, “I wish you luck.”
And then I walked away.
An hour later the article came out.

I dunno much about this show or them but I gotta say comparing a woman who's been sexually harassed to Fredo is...wow.

Maura became this beautiful symbol of transness

Pretty much every character in the show is an awful terrible selfish person so I take issue with this

Yeah Maura is horrible! They all are, maybe the son is the worst I don't know

i thought the horrible selfishness of all the characters was part of the point of the show.

but a lot of these interviews with Soloway are making me think again

I thought so, but apparently it's about beautiful symbols. xp

tbh though a lot of showrunners have weird ideas about what their shows are about / what makes them good, Soloway is hardly unique in this respect

the last season was very good, people should watch it.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/transparent-finale-photos.html

wow that's great, I didn't realize they were going to do a filmed version of this and it seemed a sad way for the series to go out without closure.

well i certainly didn't see this coming
https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/jill-soloway-replaces-bryan-singer-as-red-sonja-director.html

hahaha

so the finale for this debuted and seems to have gotten zero attention. I just stumbled on it the other night and, while I was fucking stoned as I am always when watching TV at 10pm, I thought it was exceptional. searched up reviews and it looks like that's a minority opinion but I thought this was a good way to go out.

i watched this just the other day. i liked it overall, but didn't like the musical portions, which was too bad, because it's a musical! i think it was well done, it's just not my thing (note: i do not like glee).

it was interesting as a structure, though, because it allowed the show to hit a bunch of final season/closure kind of points all in one episode, in a way that made sense within the framework of a musical.

it was actually less of a musical than I was expecting. i thought there'd be no dialogue at all.