The Binge
By Jessica Zafra
In the Pilot of Jill Soloway’s amazing series Transparent, the former Mort Pfefferman prepares to come out as a trans woman to his three grown children, Sarah, Josh and Ali.The children, being unused to sudden dinner summons from their divorced father, expect him to announce that he has cancer. They have a boisterous family dinner in which they talk over each other, make rude jokes (When Sarah tells Josh to wipe the barbecue sauce off his face, he retorts, “Why don’t you wipe the barbecue sauce from inside your vagina?”), and talk about everything but the reason they’ve been asked to dinner. Maura — the former Mort — loses her nerve and announces instead that she’s moving out of the family house. This triggers a noisy argument over who should get the house.

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Later, Maura tells a friend of her failure to reveal herself to her children. “I don’t know how it is that I raised three people that cannot see beyond themselves,” she sighs.

Having read of its op-ed-ready premise, I tuned in to Amazon’s breakout series expecting a comedy-drama about a man in his 70s adjusting to his new life as a woman. It is that, and it is also the most intimate and unfiltered look at family I can recall seeing on television. It makes other TV families look like slick inventions — not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, it is their function to divert us from real life. At its best, Transparent makes us feel like we’ve gate-crashed into the lives of affluent, educated, actual human beings.

I saw all 10 episodes of the first season in one sitting, laughing and cringing, often at the same time.

Maura Pfefferman, portrayed with sublime delicacy and vulnerability by Jeffrey Tambor, may be going through the most dramatic life change, but she’s finally confronting the truth. (“My whole life I have been dressing up as a man,” she says. “This is me.”) That cannot be said of her children, who are virtuosos at denial.

Sarah (Amy Landecker) seems to have a perfect life with her husband Len (Ron Huebel) and their children, until she runs into her ex Tammy (Melora Hardin) and realizes that she’s still in love with her. Josh (Jay Duplass), a record producer, has a messed-up history with women, beginning with the much older babysitter who took advantage of him. He refuses to consider that he was a victim of sexual abuse, insisting that he lived every boy’s wet dream. Ali (Gaby Hoffman) is a perpetual student, brimming with potential and totally inept at life.

And then there’s their mother Shelley, who’s married to the invalid Ed Paskowitz (Lawrence Pressman). Judith Light plays this most terrifying of Jewish mothers, who goes to a shiva carrying a gallon of mustard, who in two seconds goes from angrily rebuking her children (“I don’t want you to call me. I want you to be here.”) to squealing with delight because Josh is dating the female rabbi.

With the exception of Maura, a retired professor, the very articulate Pfeffermans talk around the truth, dance around the truth, crack jokes about the truth (and the Holocaust), but find ways not to deal with it. “Of course I knew that,” Shelley declares when she hears of her ex-husband’s transition. “You think I’m a dummy. It’s his thing. It’s his little private kink.” For decades it did not occur to her that Mort dressed up not to hide his true self but to reveal it.

In a flashback, Mort goes to a cross-dressing camp in the woods with his friend Marcy (Bradley Whitford) and decides to keep wearing a dress on the drive back. “It makes me happy,” he says. “I want to be happy for two more hours.” His family chooses to believe that he is a philandering husband who dates a succession of women named Marcy. Even when he comes out, some family members can’t deal with it. When Len demands to know how to explain the situation to the grandchildren, Maura replies, “I am sorry about the Mort and Maura and the he and the she. I am just a person and you are just a person and here we are. And baby, you need to get in this whirlpool or you need to get out of it.” She’s not the patriarch enforcing his will on his family, but a woman who sees humans for what they are and accepts them.

Ali, who gets cockier the more confused she is, starts dating a preoperative trans man. “This means that four out of five Pfeffermans now prefer pussy,” Josh quips. “No, pfour out of pfive Pfeffermans now pfrefer pfussy,” Ali corrects him. The amazing thing about Transparent is that it presents us with all these flawed, mixed-up individuals, but it doesn’t pass judgment on them. Even when they’re being obtuse, it treats them with the utmost compassion. In the real world, trans persons are fighting for acceptance; this is what acceptance feels like. Maura tells her ex-wife that even if she is a woman now, she is still attracted to women. “So you’re a lesbian,” Shelley says. “So we got gay-married before it was fashionable.”

Showrunner Jill Soloway, whose credits include writing and producing Six Feet Under and The United States of Tara, says Transparent was inspired by her father, a psychiatrist who came out as transgender four years ago. Funny, painful, moving, and always humane, this show is transgressive not just because of its subject matter, but because it shows us what television can be.

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.

Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.

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