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.

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Praise be! The television Gods/Jeff Bezos have smiled upon us and picked up Jill Soloway’s wonderful pilot Transparent for a complete season.

Last month our own 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, who are all too preoccupied with their own psychosexual dramas to give him space to speak. It’s brilliant, compelling, witty television set in Los Angeles’ creative (and often very Jewy) middle-class—a milieu that Soloway loves and satirizes in equal parts. We can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

http://youtu.be/dHpXcmiEIyM

Watch the full episode here.

Related: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
The Newest Best Thing on the Internet: Wifey.tv

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Another of Jill Soloway‘s gems has slipped onto the internet with very little fanfare, so we at Jewcy thought we’d bring both the fans and the fare.

Wifey.TV is “a curated video network for women”—sort of like the love child between Jezebel and Upworthy, minus the snark and sentimentality. Soloway and co-creator Rebecca Odes promise to “explore the interweb far and wide to gather video that tickles us pink, makes us think or moves us—then we put it out there for you!”

And no, you don’t have to be married to appreciate the site:

“Wifey isn’t really for wives, or about them. Wifey’s your bestie, your go-to female, the one who gets you. Our audience is anyone who needs content that gets deep inside of women as actual multi-faceted human people. Subjects, not objects…

We’ve been in those meetings where it’s a struggle to get people to invest in portrayals of women that aren’t satisfying to your average male. The powers that be promote their own imaginary idea of wish fulfillment for women…

The audience is out there, but the structure is hanging onto old mores. It’s time for a new paradigm. The female gaze is ready and waiting.”

With a variety of cleverly-named categories like sheroic and—my personal favorite—lolsob, Wifey.tv curates content from other sites and produces some of its own. There are great videos of Jill Soloway getting all up in someone’s grill, like when she interrogates Jenn Tisdale about whether she had an orgasm while filming a porno with James Deen, or when she asks a group of women at a book party whether certain things (like anti-rape underwear) are feminist or misogynist.

There’s a heartrending video of Maya Angelou in Richard Pryor’s short lived comedy—LOLSOB!!—and an utterly hilarious cartoon about why there are no strong female characters (just watch it. Right now. Trust me.) And the Women of Wall Street is a magnificent, gender-reversal satire of the Wolf of Wall Street trailer.

In “Woody’s Daughters,” Soloway meditates on the experience of watching Manhattan at the age of 14, and her conflict over the presciently creepy final scene:

“Today this scene reads like there is a gun to her head, just off camera… But the truth is, we are all his children. We inherited his rules and took them as emotional gospel. One was that a sad sack Jewish man can re-imagine himself as the object of desire for the impossibly young, impossibly beautiful Mariel Hemingway – as long as he is brilliantly funny. For a post-Holocaust generation, that math was a life raft in the face of humiliations like old, Jewish, short, ugly. His voice gave me something to hold on to, a way to win again.”

LOLSOB!!

But my favorite one of all is the video that makes people in relationships wish they were single, and single people feel like they have more purchase on that secret, quiet thing that we’re all searching for.

When asked by Forbes about why they created Wifey.TV, the duo answered as follows:

Odes: “We want to be the go-to source for women who want something to watch, whether that’s on their phone or their television. We want to produce the kind of media we want to see.”

Soloway: “To topple the patriarchy. Create a worldwide feminist revolution. To silence anonymous misogynist trolls. Emmys, Oscars, house on the beach, renovated farmhouse studio in Amagansett, private jets, quiet minds, thicker eyelashes, a friendship with Fran Lebowitz.”

Indeed. Keep it coming. We’re watching with bated breath.

RELATED: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
Jennifer Aniston Interviews Gloria Steinem At Feminist Makers Conference

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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.

A dark family comedy about sex and self, “Transparent” is “Girls” meets “Parenthood,” with some “Louie” mixed in. The plot revolves around a classic Jewish L.A. family, including divorced parents Judith Light (sublime!) and Jeffrey Tambor (almost unbearably good, equal parts vulnerable and funny), and their offspring: Jay Duplass as Josh, a music producer who we meet in bed playing with the boobs of a blond cutie; Amy Landecker as Sarah, a housewife we first glimpse hurriedly rushing her kids to school; and the astoundingly good Gaby Hoffman as Ali, a depressive twenty-something with big ideas and no money. The kids are touchingly close, and they are called in by Tambor for a family summit in which the truth he plans to tell them ends up buried, rather than revealed.

The show is equally compassionate and disdainful towards its characters, both distant from and reveling in their upper-middle-class lifestyle. (“If you don’t raise five grand for Tu B’Shevat, Dana Goodman just implodes,” quips Sarah’s erstwhile lesbian lover during school drop-off.) But it also seems to be asking viewers whether to accept or deny the father’s accusation that his children are selfish and unable to see beyond themselves, especially since the carefully guarded secret of this family’s patriarch—his transgender identity—has seeped into his kids’ psycho-sexual lives.

As the pilot unravels, we see the siblings responding individually to the truth their father fails to reveal. They seem somehow to intuit that the masculine center of their family is in flux, or perhaps, was never quite there. Ali goes in search of a trainer in the park for an old-fashioned dose of discipline in its modern masquerade—a punishing workout. Josh finds himself in the lap of someone quite the opposite of his blond bedfellow, a woman with big curly hair and large floppy breasts who tells him to get comfortable. He lies down on the floor (in the exact position in which we first see Sarah’s son), and lays his head near the woman’s crotch. Is he looking to replace his emasculated father? Or perhaps searching for the mother figure he senses waiting to emerge? And Sarah finds herself reignited by her college girlfriend, seeking out her less hetero-normative former self. The kids do see their dad for what he is, if only unconsciously, evidenced by their search for a father—or mother—figure. And Dad, too, has something to learn, should the series get picked up.

In addition to being smart and sexy, “Transparent” is also genuinely funny. “Dad’s not getting engaged—he’s too much of a pussy-hound,” says Josh on their way to the summit. “Really he’s a Marcy-hound,” Ali corrects him. “Haven’t the last six been Marcys?” (I won’t ruin it, but when the three kids try to pronounce the Jewish last names of the Marcys, hilarity ensues).

With characteristic aplomb, Jill Soloway gives us something to wonder about, something to be surprised by, something to be aroused by, and something to laugh at. A lusciously downcast soundtrack lends the whole thing a distinctively Soloway melancholy; one senses that things are not going to be OK, but somehow, it’s better that way. The only weakness is the portrayal of minorities—Ali’s black trainer and Sarah’s lesbian ex-girlfriend seem a little too close to a white liberal’s fantasy. But perhaps Soloway means this as a critique of her characters, who put these individuals to use in satisfying their cravings. We’ll only know if the show gets picked up by Amazon, so watch it and say yes to “Transparent”!

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The 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah was full of fantastic films and celebrity appearances. From among the more than 100 movies and countless screenings scheduled, here are the top five Jewish moments:

1. The Way, Way Back (Premieres)

While discussing her role as a water park employee in this hilarious comedy, actress Maya Rudolph said at a Q-and-A session, “I’m usually a funny person, but when it comes to this movie, I’m a kvelling Jew.”

2. Fill the Void (Spotlight)

In this Judaism-centric film from Orthodox director Rama Burshtein, Shira is devastated by the death of her sister during childbirth and must decide whether she wants to marry her widower, a decision which would be acceptable, if the rabbi approves, in her ultra-Orthodox Tel Aviv community.

3. Kill Your Darlings (U.S. Dramatic Competition)

Daniel Radcliffe’s Allen Ginsberg arrives at Columbia University in 1943 and meets his roommate, who asks him, “Are you Jewish? I’m getting really good at being able to tell.” Later, a sexual encounter in the library produces a similar statement from the librarian.

4. Afternoon Delight (U.S. Dramatic Competition)

In Jill Soloway’s first feature-length project, Kathryn Hahn’s Rachel gets drunk while hanging out with her fellow JCC moms and lets slip the derogatory nickname she and her friends have for one especially religious member of their group: Kosher Amanda. When Rachel confronts her later, Amanda tells her that she doesn’t even keep kosher, since she likes cooking and doing so would prevent her from making some of her favorite dishes.

5. Concussion (U.S. Dramatic Competition)

Lesbian mom and new prostitute Abby (Robin Weigert) gets nervous when a client turns out to be someone she knows, citing the fact that she’s on the board of her synagogue as one of her main concerns for being outed.

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