'Transparent': A New Season Of Heartaches And Headaches
Grab the aspirin, consider an antidepressant: The second season of Transparent is now streaming on Amazon. The highly acclaimed, much-nominated series created by Jill Soloway is back for another round of encounter sessions with the Pfefferman family, those adventurous, exhausting, brave, exasperating, funny, and selfish people.
The 10 new episodes move well beyond the first season’s focus on the gender transitioning of Morton/Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) — the series is still largely about his family’s reaction to this change, but it also establishes strong storylines for siblings Sarah (Amy Land), Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) and Josh (Jay Duplass). In the opening episode, Sarah is having grave doubts about going through with her marriage to Melora Hardin’s Tammy, and the half-hour set primarily during Sarah and Tammy’s wedding day is a bravura piece of filmmaking for creator Soloway, who is able to bring us up to date on the Pfefferman clan while wheeling through the large cast assembled for the ceremony.
Transparent is fearless in its refusal to deny that the Pfeffermans are appallingly entitled, self-absorbed people. Ever more confident in her identity, Maura has become witheringly condescending to any non-trans person who doesn’t speak to her in a way she considers correct, and she takes constant offense at the merest slight. (“Did he call me ‘sir’?” Maura asks over the head of a polite wedding photographer; Maura does a lot of stamping off in a huff this season.) She also treats ex-wife Shelly (a very strong Judith Light) like a doormat, even as living in Shelly’s condo and benefiting from Shelly’s solicitous kindness. It comes as tonic when, later in the season, Maura gets a tart lecture on civility from her less-privileged friend Davina (the wonderful Alexandra Billings).
Their kids are, of course, a mess. Josh’s relationship with the rabbi played by Kathryn Hahn is constantly undermined by his low-level anxiety about… well, everything — being in this new relationship, being a father, trying to further his music-biz career, and never having taken the time to sort out his feeling about his “Moppa.”
Ali, having recently decided she’s gay, is embarking on a rocky affair with Carrie Brownstein’s Syd. And Laura doesn’t know what she wants, really, but she’s on an intrepid quest to find it, and she doesn’t really care who she ignores or hurts. (As always with this show, the children of the adult Pfefferman siblings are pushed aside by their parents — Sarah’s children must be raising themselves, nurtured only on a diet of neglect and puzzlement.)
There are a series of flashbacks to Weimar Germany, where we see earlier-generation Pfefferman family, including some of what we’re nudged to consider as the roots of Maura’s identity. These scenes, which feature Michaela Watkins doing the best with a tritely anxious, angry character, are the weakest elements of the new season, at once too pat and too melodramatic. But the show benefits from terrific casting in its supporting roles this season, with great turns by Cherry Jones, Richard Masur, Anjelica Huston, and the poet Eileen Myles.
The Pfeffermans remain a very trying bunch. It takes immense skill on the part of everyone, in front of and behind the cameras, to make them figures you’re compelled to watch. This great effort succeeds.
Transparent is streaming now on Amazon.
