Since the Emmy’s last year I wanted to watch Transparent.
I was not dissapointed. At all. The acting is spectacular, as is the production. It seems low key but the show is very much based on the acting and dialogue.
It may seem at times the characters overlap in their talk, creating a chaotic sonorous space for the viewer… but if you have ever been at a Jewish family get-together, you will see that it is exactly that: conversations overlapping, everyone listening to everything and nothing, coveting attention and at the same time dismissing it.
What I find fascinating about the series (or at least this single (so far) season) is that although the premise is about a 60 year old man who decides to be who she really is and commit to her transgender lifestyle, this fact doesn’t take center stage.
The series is about a family, two sisters (one who is brilliant and confused, constantly. one who leaves her husband for her college lesbian lover) and a brother (who sleeps, in the course of 10 episodes, with at least 5 women); a father who is transgeder and how he deals with it, how he comes out and slowly embraces the lifestyle he has always wanted; a mother who is nursing her mute second husband to his death.
Obviously the show is about trans people and how (with a series of flashbacks) their life was in 1994 and how it is now. But it is mostly about a family, a messed up family like most families, that loves each member and is trying to survive. (I am usually not into the family dramas, except for, you know Brothers & Sisters, but this is raw and undigested, in form and content).
Bottomline: Must watch. Highly entertaining, alluring and totally worth it.