Screen time
This week, the tenderly comic pitfalls of parenting as a trans woman and all the glamour and glitz that is Strictly
The trans parent of Transparent is Maura Pfefferman. As we enter the third season of the show, it may be time to anoint Maura as one of the new golden age of TV’S all-time great characters, up there as a totem of her times with Carrie Bradshaw, Frank and Claire Underwood, Hannah Horvath, Omar Little and Tyrion Lannister. Maura is played by Jeffrey Tambor, an actor tender enough to pick at the scab of her pathos.
Season three will earn its publicity stripes for a deft, magical cameo from Caitlyn Jenner, who appears in episode three in a dental chair hallucination to Maura’s most dysfunctional offspring, Ali (Gaby Hoffman: so many heart emojis), and the elite starriness of its support cast. Anjelica Huston is Maura’s love interest, Cherry Jones her ex-wife, Alexandra Billings – one of the first trans actresses ever to play a trans role in American network drama back in 2005 – her guidance mentor.
The sensational opening episode, in which Maura tries to help a girl out when she cannot even help herself, is a beautiful 23-minute movie as affecting as anything I’ve seen on telly this year. It is bar mitzvah every day on Transparent, a drama as conspicuously chin-deep in its own Jewishness as it is its humanity. This material is startlingly fresh. You can touch the love that’s gone into making it. Begins streaming Friday on Amazon Prime