‘Transparent’ goes where no wo/man has gone before

NEW YORK — At the end of the second episode of the double Golden Globe winning series “Transparent,” Josh (played by Jay Duplass) asks his girlfriend to marry him. He escorts the super-blond Kaya over to a seat where he holds up a ring with a giant pearl on it.

“What is that?” Kaya asks hesitantly.
“It’s my Tanta Gittel’s ring. I’m pretty sure she died in the Holocaust.”
“Ew,” she sneers.
“Ew? Ew to what?” asks Josh.
“The Holocaust?” uptalks Kaya.
“Ew to the Holocaust?” asks Josh.
“No girl wants to get proposed to with a ring that came from the Holocaust.”
As Josh tries to slip the ring on her finger she flinches, taking the ring in her hand.

“Transparent” tells the story of Mort Pfefferman, played by Jeffrey Tambor, a retired college professor in his late 60s who is beginning to publicly transition from male to female, taking the name Maura. The new web-only series is also about his Los Angeles Jewish family, the Pfeffermans, who are confused and struggling in their own ways.

“It was very important to me that the Judaism of these characters not be an afterthought. If we were going to tell the story of a Jewish family, it was going to be a real commitment on our end, not an archetype we would be using as a shortcut. It had to be part of the fabric of this show,” wrote series creator, Jill Soloway, in an e-mail interview with The Times of Israel.

Sarah (Amy Landecker), the oldest daughter, is a stay-at-home mom married to Lenny; Josh is a successful music agent and ladies man; and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) is a lost 20-something, still figuring out her future. Shelly (Judith Light), Mort’s high-strung ex-wife is re-married. All of the Pfeffermans are well-meaning and self-centered.

“Now that the sun has gone down, cell phone rule is in place,” Sarah tells her family assembled around the table. It is a Friday evening a few episodes later and Maura (formerly Mort) is a guest. Sarah asks Maura, whom she calls “Mappa” (Mamma and Pappa) to light the Shabbat candles at the start of the meal.

Maura, wearing a striped dress and a long necklace begins singing the tune for lighting Chanukah candles; lighting Shabbat candles, traditionally the mother’s job, was never her role in the household.

But “Transparent” is a show about more than just a trans parent. Each of the characters is dealing with their own questions of sexual and religious identity.

Sarah has recently reconnected with her ex-girlfriend Tammy at their kids’ Jewish day school. A joke about a Tu B’Shvat fundraiser is shared before the two begin a tryst.

Five episodes in we meet Rabbi Raquel Fein (Kathryn Hahn), the family’s spiritual leader, a romantic interest, and a woman in her thirties struggling with singledom. She keeps her long brown hair tied back in a low bun, a knit yarmulke atop her head. She wears an off-white tallit for services and favors modest but tasteful dresses.

Josh attends his first Shabbat service on his own after the rabbi caught his eye. “Your mom must be freaking out that you’re here,” Rabbi Fein exclaims.

“She has no idea and you will not tell her because she would be way too excited,” Josh replies.

In a flashback to the 1990s, thirteen-year-old Ali decides that she wants to cancel her Bat Mitzvah a week before it is about to take place. She has already learned her haftorah portion, and her parents have already spent thousands on the affair.

In the final episode of the season, Shelly’s second husband Ed dies. We see Ed being wrapped in traditional burial garments and his graveside funeral which is officiated by Rabbi Fein and a cantor. At the shiva, Ali helps Fein cover the mirrors and admits to her how little she knows about Judaism.

In an argument a few moments later, Ali shouts that secrecy is the family religion. And of course, it is one of the belief systems of the Pfefferman clan who all live with a lack of transparency. It is a tenet of faith among the Pfefferman clan that they must keep their sexual lives hidden from each other.

‘It wasn’t until after my parent came out to me that the concept of the show fully came into being’

“It wasn’t until after my parent came out to me that the concept of the show fully came into being — not just because of the narrative potential I saw in our own lives but also because that experience really illuminated to me just how much I didn’t know,” noted Soloway.

“Much of my writing is intensely personal, but only because it is by definition filtered through the lens of my experiences. The personal elements are, for me, a means of telling what I hope is a much more universal story,” said Soloway.

“Transparent” has the abrasiveness and confusion of Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” and the neurosis of Woody Allen films, but its setting is very obviously not New York City where so many shows about American Jews take place. The B-roll is of quiet, verdant streets dotted with cypress and palm trees, the LA skyline, the Pacific Ocean. The family has a standing order at Canter’s, the iconic LA Jewish deli. Everyone drives. The Pfefferman kids complain to each other that though they grew up in California they never went out on boats because as Jews their parents were “terrified about everything.”

“The writers and I try to draw from our experiences and the lives of those around us,” remarked Soloway who runs the East Side Jews group in LA. “It’s important that these characters’ lives unfold in the way that feels most appropriate and specific to them, but we also want to keep the show grounded in the details of what makes this world so unique: the particulars of transness and queerness, of Judaism, of life in Los Angeles, which are so rarely reflected elsewhere in the media.” Soloway added that Amazon has fully supported her vision.

Soloway and her team (which includes trans consultants) are currently working on season two. Said Soloway of the future, “Now that the closet of Pfefferman family secrets has been flung wide open, how will each of them pick up the pieces? What does rebuilding look like for each person, and how do those different ideas of ‘moving forward’ come into conflict with each other? That’s what we want to explore this season.”

‘Transparent’, which just won two Golden Globe Awards, is available on Amazon Prime in the US, UK, and Germany, and is being distributed elsewhere by Sony International.