Transparent - Jill Solloway television series on Amazon

would not be the spine the son so clearly lacked but needed to save colton from his fundie foster parents

Eh, I didn't exactly see it that way. Taking Colton in didn't necessarily strike me as the right thing to do, and I don't know that he needed "saving" given that he was nearly ready to leave home anyway.

I'm not sure the show is "more" about Jews than gender identity, and it's also about families, and it's also about narcissism, and also about Los Angeles affluent liberal culture. But it definitely is a lot about Jews.

i know, i know. Jewishness feels like the common thread, but then it's the most obvious point of connection for me (being Jewish).

it's as much about jews as it is about privilege as it is about gender identity imo

there is, as jordan points out, a lot of "only my real jews are gonna get this" jokes

Like when Josh told the fundie dad "Colton *is* Jewish" and then sort of muttered "according to the reform movement anyway"

I just came here and I was going to be all I REALLY NEED TO TALK ABOUT SEASON 2 but now I see you've been doing that for a while so I will catch up and brb.

especially in the episode with the forest gathering. that was just amazing.

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, December 16, 2015 11:26 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

YES THIS WAS VERY GOOD

Like when Josh told the fundie dad "Colton *is* Jewish" and then sort of muttered "according to the reform movement anyway"

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, December 30, 2015 12:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why cause normally you're considered Jewish if the mother is Jewish?

Everyone is horrible except for Sid and Colton and the rabbi but I even didn't like her very much at points. I think that I hate Gabby Hoffman the most but that could be because I just with my parents bankrolled me until I was 33 so that I could have been a perpetual student who got high all the time. But yeah they're all horrible and yet I still feel for them and want them to be ok and get through all their bullshit. Maybe I like it because they feel relatably fucked up.

They're very cuddly for siblings though. Maybe that's not a big thing and it just seems weird to me because I'm an only child but do most adults get naked and cuddle with their sibs as much as these three seem to?

SPOILER
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
It seemed heavily implied to me that the fundie family, in their "not even the USPS can be trusted, we have to do this in person" paranoia, were anti-vaxxers who killed the rabbi's baby by hugging a bunch of measles onto her. She broke out in pox right after they left. Was there anything explicit said to support this? Am I just pulling it out of thin air? Was it so obvious that they didn't have to say anything about it?

woah

stop blowing my mind crump

i don't think it was obvious at all but now that you say it . . .

i didn't think about it, but maybe? it seems like if it was supposed to be something to be noticed that they'd make it more obvious. maybe it'll come up next season?

did not make that connection!

it didn't even occur to me but now it DOES seem kind of obvious or at least a little coincidental

Like when Josh told the fundie dad "Colton *is* Jewish" and then sort of muttered "according to the reform movement anyway"

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, December 30, 2015 12:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why cause normally you're considered Jewish if the mother is Jewish?

― Benson and the Jets (ENBB), Wednesday, 30 December 2015 19:03 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Yes, and also because the whole question of what *really* makes a person Jewish is an intense source of anxiety and debate among Jews.

The closeness of the disasters, one after another, seemed to be a line that indicated causality to me -- the separation from Colton via the Hug 'n Judge Bunch, the "whoa you've got stuff all over your back," the silence of the ultrasound. I dunno. I figured Josh would infect half of L.A. when he went to that music biz party later that night, but that didn't happen.

guess i'm displaying my wild ignorance here (first time on ILX!!), but:

- if you're antivax does that mean you can carry measles without being infected yourself?
- can measles cause miscarriages?

And I mean, you know, because while he's the biological son of a Jewish guy he's spend only a tiny and recent percentage of his life with his Jewish dad, so it also says something about the character's self-involvement and slightly shallow understanding of what it means to be a dad. Layers. I'm sure I've overexplained it by now. xp

x-post Yes to the second point for sure and I am not 100% positive about the first but I do think someone who was recently infected and not yet showing signs can pass it on so one of the fundies could have been infected but not know yet.

x-post - That makes sense i just thought the reform comment was because he was Jewish but (presumably) Rita isn't etc.

God Josh is the worst.

yeah that's why he made the comment, I just mean there were some cultural nuances to why it was funny

i just figured that the stress of the Colton thing and generally being around Josh and his family contributed to the miscarriage (and her decision to leave).

hmmm, according to the guardian recap of ep 6:

Back at home, Josh notices a rash on Raquel’s back. The pair are worried it could be measles – potentially devastating in pregnancy – and see a doctor, who tells them it isn’t, but that Raquel has miscarried.

so i dunno. it's an interesting idea though!

Pastor and Missus Gump rob Josh of both of his children with one blow... the Christian hug that's just a cover for destruction... makes u think, etc

Off Topic, but You Can Count On Me is on TV right now, and I forgot that Gabby Hoffman played Ruffalo's girlfriend in it.

Gabby Hoffman's hair in this is like a whole character by itself. A deeply annoying character.

Josh in episode 6 going to that industry douchefest and getting drunk after what had happened that day. smh. I hate you Josh!

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

― the plight of y0landa (forksclovetofu), Sunday, February 1, 2015 3:45 PM

This thread seems as good place as any to mention the new web series Her Story. It isn't perfect (some of the dialogue can be too on-the-nose, and some of the character arcs are too compressed due to time and resource constraints), but it's promising in terms of representation insofar as it's written and directed by trans women, and generally avoids pandering or condescension:

http://herstoryshow.com

I will check it out, thanks!

Okay, I just powered through this and it was worth watching!

The good: storylines I've not seen anywhere before (a kept trans woman in an abusive relationship, a woman's justifiable trepidation on self-outing to a possible boyfriend who is too perfect), your note about lack of "pandering or condescension" is generally accurate as it pertains to the creators' belief that the audience is willingness to engage without prejudice, both of the lead trans actors (Jen Richards, Angelica Ross) are very good and watching them work certainly supports the argument that a trans woman playing a trans woman is going to bring a different level of gravitas and believability to the role than a cis man in drag would

The bad: yes the necessary compression of the spec storyline is partially to blame but the biggest issues are occasionally bad acting... Laura Zak, the woman playing Allie in particular, though she's apparently also the co-writer? I'd be curious to see who was responsible for what, as it also suffers from inconsistent script-writing and occasionally surprisingly clumsy direction. The characters are all spectacularly unrealistically gorgeous (there's some of the same DNA as s1 of 'Looking' at play here) which is soap opera gloss I don't need or want. The B-stories feel barely sketched out (Bad Penny in particular is a bad misstep). Eve Ensler is a producer, which makes me nervous.

The ugly: flawed or not (and warts and all it's certainly no worse than a dozen recent television pilots I've seen), given the current political and television climate, this should be getting more mainstream attention! i am a massive media nerd living in a major city, i should have already heard about this!

oh and just to clarify a point in terms of representation: of the three women responsible for writing and direction, only one of the writers appears to be trans if i'm reading the support materials correctly, yes?

Sorry, forks/ulysses, I should have specified more exactly: the series was co-written by Jen Richards and Laura Zak (who is cis), and I'd like to know more about the division of writing labor myself. I agree with most of yr reservations (especially about the unnecessary gloss, though my biggest issue was that the abuse storyline resolved itself too quickly to be fully convincing), but I do really hope Richards and her collaborators find a way to keep developing the series. I think that a lot of the most innovative and nuanced trans art these days takes place in writing (especially fiction and poetry on small presses like Topside and Biyuti, but also on blogs, in zines, in the performance art of people like Juliana Huxtable, and in the recent flowering of Twine games) because it requires less extensive access to capital than is the case with television or film (though obviously class inequalities still massively affect literary production and reception). Still, I do find this series (and Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel's Happy Birthday, Marsha!, once it's through with post-production) to at least be encouraging.

(I also found Red Durkin's comments on the series and the danger of "the after-school effect" here to be useful.)

thanks for that durkin link; I don't know her but that covered most of my caveats both spoken and unspoken, but better.

Issues of capital and potential audience backlash do seem to be at the direction of new trans art; I would add theater to that list but then I have the benefit of living in a major city where i can (and will!) see three trans-focused pieces of theater over three months: Taylor Mac's excellent 'HIR', the brilliant Erin Markey's 'Ride on the Irish Cream' (tomorrow, yay) and 'Southern Comfort' at The Public.

This is very much NOT my community though I have friends and am smitten by people enmeshed in that world and find the development of trans-rights/issues/arts to be one of the more interesting culture and legal shifts of my lifetime... I don't necessarily wanna be the one to do it, but maybe we can/should start a "Rolling Trans Art" thread as that would be a more appropriate place for that discussion than here?

I'd be interested in starting a trans arts thread - maybe later this week, after the 2015 albums countdown ends?

please!

I've set it up here: Rolling trans art thread

thanks!

Watched the season finale. Damn, it hit me hard -- this show is really good.

season 2 did nothing to change my mind that it is primarily a show about Jews, rather than gender identity. really, really liked it.

― expertly crafted referential display name (Jordan), Wednesday, December 30, 2015 11:55 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ive watched up thru the yom kippur ep (which was great) & the least compelling character in the show is tambors imo

I can't help but also feel like the show is more about narcissism than about gender identity, and that in the case of the Tambor character, her struggle with gender identity and transition is as much a vehicle for her character's narcissism as anything else. I don't mean that narcissism causes her gender issue, I just mean in terms of the character's role in the show, the narcissism is kind of more important for the character than the gender transition.

This is part of what I find frustrating about the series (beyond the casting); it's not that I need the characters to be sympathetic, but I just don't find the Pfeffernans interesting as characters. I realize that this is a series made for a cis audience, and that it's not likely to go much deeper on the relationships between its trans characters, but even beyond that, its focus just seems extremely socially narrow in a way the writers can't manage to make compelling: how many more dramas about the family lives of wealthy narcissists do we really need?

^^^ This is a personal reaction, not necessarily a fair one, to be clear, but I do think Alexandra Billings and Hari Nef were underused, and that the series is generally more interesting the more it focuses on its minor characters.

xp its more a comedy than drama imo but thats a valid pt (your last one)

how many more dramas about the family lives of wealthy narcissists do we really need?

I get this, but how many more dramas do we really need about zombies, british aristocrats, cops, presidents, people who live in haunted houses, Colombian drug lords, single twenty-somethings, etc. There probably are topics that we do need more dramas about, most notably poor and working class people. But TV is vast and I can't fault a show solely for its subject matter, and anyway I started to find the characters more sympathetic during the second half of S2. If anything, I think that tapping into the sadness underneath narcissism is not something a lot of shows manage.

I get this, but how many more dramas do we really need about zombies, british aristocrats, cops, presidents, people who live in haunted houses, Colombian drug lords, single twenty-somethings, etc.

I'd be fine with at least a few years' moratorium on these, tbqh