Transparent’s song-and-dance shtick
Once groundbreaking, TV show exits on a weak note, Daniel D’Addario writes.
Transparent
Series finale, Friday, Amazon
LOS ANGELES Transparent may well have a chapter, or a section of one, in some yet-to-be-written history of television, in part thanks to how brazen and how daring its ideas were for its moment.
Some were ideas that came to seem simply logical in retrospect: The show was a path-breaker for trans representation onscreen, casting trans performers to play characters (though, notably, not the “trans parent” of the title) whose journeys they shared. This represents a meaningful step forward. It’s Transparent’s legacy, and a good one.
Others of its choices — its assertiveness in moving its characters in radical new decisions, only to reverse those decisions and return the story to a consequence-free stasis some episodes later; its tendency to substitute robust emotionality over storytelling rigour — were carried across, or almost were, thanks simply to its brio.
Pushed along by Jill Soloway, a showrunner whose force of personality helped make Soloway a public figure, the show believed in itself strongly enough that it could seem churlish to ask what the plan was, say, for any of the characters other than the three (played by Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light and Gaby Hoffmann) on whom the show tended to focus most closely.
Unfortunately, if a show’s final impressions are how it will last in the memory, Transparent will be remembered for its least admirable qualities — vacillation, imprecision and flippancy. The series, which is to end its run with a feature-length musical episode debuting Friday, pushes and shoves its way toward attempted profundity in songs of wildly variable quality, while simply ditching out on the storyline of several characters it never knew what to do with.
The format and premise here stem from the departure of Tambor, who had occupied the show’s centre when it began and had increasingly grown a more diffuse presence even before his firing after allegations of workplace misconduct from others involved in the show. We learn that Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman has died in her sleep. What follows takes place in the immediate aftermath, as Maura’s effects are dispersed and family members mourn in their own ways.
Worry that Tambor’s shadow would loom large over the special would have been misplaced.
The Pfefferman family’s way of dealing with crises small and large is by centring themselves, and through the shapelessness of grief and the bagginess of Transparent’s storytelling, we check in with various characters.
Transparent was always elastic with its reality, in moments powerful and confusing. And a musical episode is necessarily going to play things yet more fast and loose. But there’s a pointlessness to the whole enterprise here, a sense that one’s last looks at characters who were uniquely well-drawn and carefully wrought are being dithered away on a theatrical framework that requires so much jerry-rigging to make sense that moments and interactions are slipping away.
This episode was plainly a passion project for Soloway, whose sibling Faith wrote the music. It ends with a sweeping statement about the nature of Jewish existence whose conceit it seems unsporting to reveal, except to say that its underpinning central metaphor about celebrating one’s life despite memories of the Holocaust is carried across with the sensitivity and grace of the fictional musical Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.
It seems designed to be brashly offensive. It’s a really bad note to go out on.
It’s another one of Transparent’s big swings that doesn’t connect — but it’s the last image we’re left with, a finale seemingly built to diminish the show in memory and ensure that its recording in the annals of television history is less chapter than footnote.
Variety.com