We’re super-excited about the debut of Jill Soloway’s new TV show Transparent, which started out as a one-off Amazon studios pilot, then got picked up by the book/entertainment/cat litter behemoth for development into a complete season. Episode one premieres on September 26. (Shana tova, indeed.)
Earlier this year Batya Ungar-Sargon offered high praise for the dark, comic family drama set in L.A.:
They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.
In the pilot, patriarch Mort (played by Jeffrey Tambor) tries—and fails—to reveal his transgender identity to his three children. Judging by the trailer for season one, though, it’s clear that Mort is officially out of closet. Meanwhile, his kids are dealing with their own emotional/professional/pyschosexual dramas. Who’s the most well-adjusted? The most repressed? Tune in and find out!
Also! There’s a great profile of Soloway in this week’s New York Times Magazine, where she speaks frankly about her fascination with gender stereotypes and sexual identity. Turns out there’s an element of autobiography in her art: her own father came out as trans in 2011.
Soloway has cycled through a lot of emotions about her father’s revelation since that phone call three years ago, but the first one she felt was relief. “No wonder I was so obsessed with these questions,” she said on a Sunday morning in July, sitting at the same table where she took the call. “Not even deep down. I think out in front these gender questions were part of our family — the discomfort with traditional roles of masculinity and femininity in our house.
Read on here.