Transparent - Jill Solloway television series on Amazon

is he supposed to be likable? i don't think so

Er, I mean the opposite

All of the characters are constantly rewarded by the narrative on account of their materially rich lives that are mostly free of real consequences. None of them seem to work particularly hard, none of them seem to have crises of the non-existential nature, all live a leisurely, meandery lifestyle in aesthetically beautiful surroundings.

basically curb your enthusiasm

yeah it's high quality but I don't know if I can take these people again

All of the characters are constantly rewarded by the narrative on account of their materially rich lives that are mostly free of real consequences.

Ehh I don't really care about this. Would dispute the "constantly rewarded" part too. It's the correct critique for Soloway's movie, Afternoon Delight, but I don't think it applies to the show.

Plus, even in a wealthy milieu it's still a big deal for female/trans actors and filmmakers. And there's the novelty of seeing reform Jewish lives that vaguely resemble mine, or at least share reference points.

(It's not a perfect show by an means obvs.)

Just finished S4 this afternoon and I think it's my favorite season of the series. This one felt less driven by crisis, so the whole family could take some time and do the work of figuring out their own shit and how to go forward, and it's interesting work.

yea I only have ep 10 left ~ its an interesting/smart conceit, I always feel like once shows are a few seasons in you just need to find fresh/new ways to get your characters in one place...a season in Israel was really the perfect way for this particular show to do that imo

I loved this season.

http://deadline.com/2017/11/jeffrey-tambor-leaving-transparent-sexual-harassment-allegations-amazon-jill-soloway-1202211711/

wow. this terrible but I feel like the show ended on a high note if it's over after this past season, which I adored.

i would imagine they're gonna pivot to have the trans actors on the show all be real trans actors which might be the best thing when everything's said and done. I loved tambor in the role but it was hard to justify having him do it except that the show wouldn't have been made without a lead name. Now the show is the name and I think they can make it work.

yeah direction of the show will have to really change. to the point where maybe they need to completely shift it to another family.

I mean, they could literally just recast the role. there is plenty of precedent.

five years in, recasting the primary character would be jarring; but the show is about identity and has played with plenty of things (having Gabby HOffman play her ancestor etc); it could be an interesting creative challenge.

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.