I was told this was a comedy.
No doubt, Transparent features comedic actors — Jeffrey Tambor as Maura, Jay Duplass as Josh, Judith Light as Shelly, Melora Hardin as Tammy, Rob Huebel as Len, Kathryn Hahn as Raquel and Carrie Brownstein as Syd — and traffics in comedy elements like awkwardness and obliviousness and misunderstanding. The episodes are even around a half-hour long, which our television-conditioned brains tell us equals sitcom. And it’s been classified as a comedy by awards bodies like the Golden Globes, the Emmys, et al. In watching the show, however, Transparent felt far from comedic.
That’s not to say I didn’t laugh or find amusement in areas, but I found amusement in parts of Breaking Bad, too. Not that Transparent is Breaking Bad, but even a run-of-the-mill family drama like Parenthood is funny in places. That doesn’t make it a comedy. Given, there are a number of shows currently on the books as comedies that blur the line pretty significantly, such as Nurse Jackie and genre-jumping favorites of mine Orange is the New Black and Shameless. But of all these non-comedy comedies, Transparent feels like the most non-comedy comedy of them all. (I even tweeted as much.)
What I also mention in that tweet, though, is that despite not striking me as particularly comedic, Transparent is also beautiful. Sad and awful and beautiful. Tambor’s Maura is a transgender woman who’d been hiding her true identity almost her entire life. Now divorced (from Shelly) with three grown, selfish children (Josh plus two sisters in Ali and Sarah, played by Gaby Hoffmann and Amy Landecker, respectively), Maura is selling her home and moving into a community where she can live openly and exclusively as a woman. And to be sure, Tambor’s performance is the least typically comedic of all, making it clear that this woman is not to be mocked and her life is not to be made light of. What she’s doing is brave and scary and worthwhile. It’s emphatically not a joke, and I think the awkwardness and confusion her children feel around her, while understandable, is perhaps what makes them so insufferable in my eyes. It infuriates me.
To be fair — if it can be considered fair, that is — the kids aren’t just awful toward Maura. They’re awful toward everyone. They’re just plain awful — self-centered and greedy and only ever interested in their own instant gratification, almost never considering anyone else’s feelings. And when they do, briefly, think of someone else before themselves, they just get irrationally angry at everyone else for not being as selfless as they are. It’s asinine. That’s not to say that the behavior is unearned or that there aren’t stakes and motivations built into these characters to make their behavior true to their personalities — the show itself is well-crafted — it’s just that their personalities are awful and I legit cheered when Maura finally started going off on them. (Not that Maura didn’t have a few selfish moments of her own that we see via flashback, so at least they come by it honestly.)
One thing that I did find problematic on the whole was the way female sexuality was presented as so mutable, while male sexuality wasn’t. To clarify, many of the female characters are sexually interested in women, even if they’re originally presented as being interested in men. There’s even a joke made, when Amy has left her husband Len for Tammy and Ali is dating a transgender man (who makes clear to her he still has a vagina), that with the exception of their mom Shelly, all the Pfeffermans love pussy. (Maura, it is implied though never outright stated, is still only interested in women, as she was when she was living as Mort.) In addition to the family leanings, there’s a big out-of-nowhere revelation at the end of the series that Ali’s longtime best friend Syd, who has been sleeping with Josh off and on, is actually in love with Ali. But none of the male characters share this flexibility of sexual attraction. Josh and Len think lesbians are cool, but are clearly strictly straight men themselves. And when Ali attempts to have a threesome with two men, they balk and throw her out, despite being heavily under the influence of Ecstasy, when she attempts to get them to sexually interact with each other. It’s probably not an intention of the show to portray sexuality that way, but to me it definitely feels like even in a show as open and groundbreaking as this one, gay male sex is more taboo, more shocking, and less accepted, than lesbian sex. I’ll be interested to see if the second season continues along that line.
But more than that, I’ll be interested to see how this family drama develops in season two, because season one ended with quite a lot of drama on deck. Some of it even comedic.
Transparent is available to stream exclusively on Amazon.
Viable Option 