Transparent - Jill Solloway television series on Amazon

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.