In an early episode of Transparent‘s second season, Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), who’s decided to go back to school, sits in a lecture, utterly captivated. Her professor is explaining nothing less than the universe itself. “When you look up at the sky, you’re not seeing the universe as it is today,” her instructor explains. “You’re not seeing the sky as it is. You’re seeing it as it was hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago — the multitudinous past of every star, sending photons hurtling through space, each one a clue as to our origins. What you are looking at is the past.”
This brief and powerful synopsis of the universe serves just as well as a synopsis of Transparent‘s second — and equally powerful — season. While season one dealt primarily with the gender transition of Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor, whose performance on the series has earned him several awards, including a Golden Globe), season two centers on what comes next — both for Maura and for every member of her fabulous, self-absorbed, fascinating family — but also, and even more significantly, on what came before.
With this new crop of episodes, creator Jill Soloway is out to remind us that none of us were born from, or operate within, a vacuum. She’s making incisive, almost painfully accurate points about how we view our own families and our places within them — how, when we look at our brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, we aren’t seeing them as they are today, or as they’d like to be seen. We’re seeing them as they once were, or shoehorning them into and excising them from our own narratives, often refusing to accept their personal growth for fear it might send us hurtling into the unknown corners of our own souls. But, Soloway seems to be saying, no matter how hard we try to escape its orbit, the gravitational pull of our family — both its present-day iteration and its multitudinous origins — is impossible to resist. And we shouldn’t even try: We can’t truly change or move forward unless we reckon with it directly.
Season two’s cold open illustrates this point particularly (and hilariously) well. The Pfeffermans, clad in all-white for the splashy wedding of Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Tammy (Melora Hardin), stand on a patch of green grass, ostensibly posing for a family photo. It’s a wide shot, and while the camera doesn’t move, the Pfeffermans can’t stay still. Standing next to each other, dressed in matching outfits, they hardly interact, each lost in his or her own world. As such, the photo shoot is a total clusterfuck. Sarah, her face poorly masking pure panic, fails at several attempts to corral her children. Tammy yells loudly and repeatedly for her two ex-wives to join the photo. Josh (Jay Duplass) can’t stop resting his hand protectively over Rabbi Raquel’s (Kathryn Hahn) newly pregnant belly, despite her protestations that the baby remain secret for now. Maura, obsessed by and insecure about her appearance, continually asks the photographer how she should pose. “Do you want my head up, or do you want my head down?” she asks. The photographer replies, “I think chin up for you, sir.” Maura, aghast, turns to her ex-wife Shelly (Judith Light), and asks, “Did he just call me sir? We’re done. We’re done.” The two grasp hands and walk out of the frame, and the rest of the Pfeffermans disperse, floating separately into the ether before even a single Facebook-worthy photo can be taken.
Maura’s behavior in this first scene is a harbinger of things to come. Though season one placed her carefully at the moral center of the show, season two lets her loose. No longer is Maura the sole transgender representative on television, and Soloway, understanding this, has promptly and dramatically un-sainted her. This season, Maura is just as selfish, blind, and salty-tongued as her children. She can’t make up her mind about whether she’d like to resume a sexual relationship with Shelly, whose seemingly unending patience and acceptance starts to chafe. She ditches a family pool party to go dancing with her friends. Most poignantly, she’s forced to contend with what comes after a personal revolution. The hard part, as it turns out, isn’t deciding to change. It’s the act of changing, which is something Maura can’t do alone, or without examining what prevented her from being her authentic self for all those years.
In a delightful scene in one of the first few episodes, the inimitable Cherry Jones pops up as a “radical feminist” from Maura’s past, reminding Maura that one of the things that held her back in her younger years was holding other women back. It’s a revelation that surprises and saddens Maura, who realizes that, for all of her staring critically at her own reflection, she still doesn’t completely understand herself. Even Maura’s doctor won’t agree to further discuss surgical transition until, as she puts it, “you do yourself a favor and get to know your body.”
The rest of the Pfeffermans are similarly suspended in space, unable to move forward, both fixated on and avoiding the past in equal measure. Sarah, who left her husband Len (Rob Huebel) in season one to engage in a passionate lesbian affair, has a full-scale panic attack in the bathroom at her wedding, realizing that while she has no idea what she wants, she definitely doesn’t want to be married to Tammy. (Jill Soloway is the only person who could make a gorgeous white wedding feel like a Lynchian nightmarescape, right down to the wedding singer’s smeared lipstick and dark, ennui-drenched take on the Hora.) A later episode sees her creeping back into the home she once shared with Len, snooping through his new lover’s hot-pink suitcase, and, inexplicably, trying to bait Tammy’s ex (Tig Notaro) into hanging out with her.
Facing fatherhood for the second time (but it’s different, because “this time I know I’m a father,” he says to Ali in the premiere), Josh can’t seem to decide whether he wants to be a wise patriarch or a witty friend to his meaty, morally upright birth son, Colton (Alex MacNicoll). He straddles something between the two while simultaneously stoking the flames of his music career, which scares Raquel, who isn’t convinced he’s ready to do much more than play house with her. Meanwhile, Ali has plunged headfirst into several exploratory experiences at once, without committing too much to any particular thing: a new look that regularly involves a jaunty necktie, a new sexual fluidity, a new degree, and a new obsession with her family tree. Poring over books in the library with her new girlfriend (no spoilers as to who this might be), Ali becomes fascinated with the concept of “epigenetics” and inherited trauma, or, as she explains it, “the idea that it’s impossible to escape one’s past.”
Soloway means this literally. In a noticeable shift from its season-one formula, each episode of season two is interspersed with flashbacks to pre-Hitler Berlin, where the Pfefferman’s Jewish ancestors (occasionally played by actors we’ve already seen) are analogously contending with sexuality, secrets, and self-awareness. The flashbacks — which I won’t reveal much about here, as their contents are best devoured slowly and thoughtfully — hammer home Soloway’s point about context and history, about the inevitability and importance of getting sucked into the black hole of one’s own past. They also make a point about the unknowability of the future — the Berlin Pfeffermans have no idea that their own attempts at self-discovery will be squelched by the Nazis. Which throws the Los Angeles Pfeffermans’ endless navel-gazing (the ability to do so being a gift they take utterly for granted) into even sharper relief.
Here’s the thing about the Pfeffermans, though, and the thing that makes Transparent such a singularly terrific show. While each member of the family is selfish, childish, and almost fundamentally flawed, they’re all completely and unavoidably lovable. Josh, in a rare moment of wisdom, says as much to an angry Raquel in an early scene: “I know you’re sitting around collecting wrongs so you can prove to yourself that this relationship is wrong, or that you’re not lovable. You’re lovable. We both are.” Even as they set flame to their own lives, hurl insults and cake at one another, and make questionable hair choices, the Pfeffermans are grounded and human, written and acted with a rare realism that makes them altogether enrapturing.
While Transparent is about one family, both unhappy and happy, it’s also about all families unhappy and not, which — sorry, Tolstoy — do exist, and are more alike than different. Watching the Pfefferman’s flail and fight and, on occasion, fondly embrace feels like sitting at a particularly amusing family dinner, one rife with conflict and awkward tension but also with inside jokes and plenty of wine. I’m Jewish, but I didn’t grow up in Los Angeles. I’m a woman, but I don’t have a transgender father, or divorced parents, or a brother who bore a child with our babysitter. But each episode of Transparent, without fail, brings to mind my own clan, in all of our dysfunction and delight. Each time the Pfeffermans sit down to eat cole slaw with a serving spoon, or wipe barbecue sauce from each other’s faces, or counsel each other inside a bathroom stall, it hits me right in the kishkes, as it were, bringing me to laughter and tears, often at the exact same time.
This is both a testament to Soloway’s uncompromising vision and to the actors themselves, who’ve found an uncommon creative alchemy, operating on something of an astral plane together. Transparent, like the Pfeffermans, is the sum of its parts. It’s messy, it’s idiosyncratic, it’s magic, it’s funny, it’s uncomfortable, it’s charming, it’s sexy, it’s horrifying, it’s heartbreaking. In this way, it’s as chaotic, unlikely, and extraordinary as the universe itself.
Transparent’s first episode is already available on Amazon Prime; the rest of the season drops December 11.
