Transparent: Season 5

Yeah, I'm calling this one-episode feature-length finale a season of television, rather than a movie. Why? Because that's how it's been billed. Fuck, man, I dunno.

Let's talk a little bit about the history and legacy of the show Transparent, which won all kinds of Emmy awards and critical acclaim in part for depicting a transgender character's late-in-life transition and arguably lending visibility and cultural legitimacy to the trans community before kind of ironically, kind of predictably, kind of spectacularly blowing up five years later, in large part due to criticism and complaints from the same trans community it had helped legitimize.

(Look, I'm not complaining - that's literally what progress is! In 2014, our collective culture at large was introduced to so many aspects of life in the trans community that had previously gone unexplored by the mainstream by this show, explicitly; by 2017 or 2018, that community's cultural impact and visibility had already grown large enough for the same collective mainstream to take its cues on trans issues directly from said community, including criticisms and critiques of the same show that had arguably done more to boost awareness of the community than anything else in the first place. Oh God, this is a mouthful - can you tell I'm out of my element here?)

Let me maybe try phrasing it another way - no, don't take the shovel from me, I'm still digging! Like in 2014, it was, "give Jeffrey Tambor the Emmy for his heartfelt and dignified portrayal of a trans woman," and three years later it was, "it's nothing short of cis-washing that a trans character like Maura is played by a straight man like Jeffrey Tambor." I think the first take was a fine take in 2014 and I think the second take was a fine take to have in 2017 and I think it's very difficult for the zeitgeist at large to have the 2017 take without having first had the 2014 take. Does that make sense? Look, it's complicated!

All of that having been said, this show kind of stopped being about one trans woman's transition process and her family's reaction to that transition process somewhere along the way, and started being more about each of the family members' sexual and gender-based proclivities and hang-ups, and even some of their general flaws as people. Oh, and it's also somehow the most Jewish show of the decade.

But yeah, it's clearly run out of steam, and I can't think of a compelling reason it needed this finale once it was clear Jeffrey Tambor wouldn't be returning, beyond not letting Jeffrey Tambor's firing force the show to end prematurely; even though I said the show stared being about Maura's family as much as if not more than Maura somewhere along the way, what purpose does Transparent really have without the titular trans parent? Or, more directly, if you're going to make the finale of Transparent consist of the death of the trans parent, and you're going to loo at the family's reactions to that death... what are you doing making this thing a musical? None of these actors can even really sing, save for Judith Light, kinda. But what on earth - I mean, do these actors look like they want to be doing this? Does any of this seem like it was fun for them?

The most notable and controversial element of this whole thing is that it ends with a number called the "Joyocaust," whose premise as far as Twitter and I can tell is that Jews spend so much time, understandably, focusing on the dark and negative energy of the Holocaust - six million dead Jews! - that they ought to come up with some sort of positive energy counterbalance, some sort of joy, rather than horror, that can match twelve years of suffering and six million deaths. It's twice as insane as anything Marrianne Williamson is running on and way more tone deaf, but most of all it's a head-scratcher - less "oh wow, this is offensive!" and way more "this is such a weird note to end on."

Oh well. So long, Transparent. You were once very necessary, and then you got a little weird, and then in the end long after you were necessary you were just very weird. Thank you for your service!