When people refer to the much-discussed current golden age of TV, they’re invariably thinking of the muscular likes of The Sopranos, The Wire, The West Wing and Breaking Bad. All great beasts of shows, if, let’s be honest, a little too aware of their greatness at times, and all entirely rooted in masculinity.
But when it comes to the ultimate era-capturing show, as opposed to an era-defining one, none of the above really fits the bill. Instead, I’d recommend a drama that could not care less about how masculinity fits into the modern world. Each episode is a humble 30 minutes, as opposed to a grandstanding hour-plus, and it looks at something at least as important today as the dying roars of white men: sexual fluidity and the freedoms this engenders, but also, potentially, the narcissism.
Transparent, which has just released its third series, is a post-patriarchal show both literally and metaphorically. (The show’s creator and writer, Jill Soloway, even named her production company Topple, as in – pleasingly – topple the patriarchy.) It tells the story of a Jewish father (Jeffrey Tambor) who comes out as transgender to the astonishment of his three adult children, all of whom are sexually confused and narcissistic in distinctly 21st century western ways.
I interviewed Soloway and Tambor in 2014, and it’s hard to say who left me the more starstruck: the brilliant Tambor, or Soloway, a woman so talented I would tear off my right arm to write a tenth as well as her. The devotion between the two of them was palpable. But two years is a long time in identity politics, and Soloway recently gave an interview in which she set out to topple another form of patriarchy. “The time has come when it is unacceptable for cis men to play trans women,” she said. Of course, as she conceded, she has made a show in which a cis man does just that. But, she explained, “it started in a different time”.
This question of who has the right to tell other people’s stories is in many ways the political movement of our time. No one really knows what the answer is yet: on the one hand, Jonathan Franzen is criticised for saying he doesn’t write black characters because “I have never been in love with a black woman” (like Ricky Gervais, Franzen often sounds in interviews like his own worst characters); on the other, Lionel Shriver is pilloried for dismissing the concept of cultural appropriation. Now no one should expect Shriver and Franzen, neither of them known for their sensitivity, to give a reasoned take on this situation. But the issue touches on two distinctly modern concerns: first, giving the previously unheard a voice – a seat at the table, to use the title of Solange Knowles’ timely new album; and second, the idea that personal experience is the only thing that counts.
The former is a proposition only an idiot of Trump proportions would fail to support. The latter I find much more dubious. This week saw the screening of Sally Phillips’ BBC documentary, A World Without Down’s Syndrome, in which Phillips, the mother of a boy with Down’s, gave a too-little-heard positive perspective on the condition. But the clearly well-meaning film tipped into anti-choice bullying – Phillips couldn’t listen to a woman explaining why she aborted her Down’s baby without imagining it was her own son – and an antenatal expert has criticised the documentary as “not at all helpful”. The problem lies in suggesting that the singular experience is universal; the truth, not acknowledged in the film, is that Phillips has options other Down’s families don’t.
The issue isn’t so much who tells the stories but that they are told well, and often these two things come together: lived experience expanded by creative interpretation, and they don’t have to come from the same person. Transparent tells the story of an older trans woman so well, partly because Soloway and Tambor worked with people who had gone through similar experiences, and partly because Tambor is a brilliant actor. To say the personal is not everything is not to argue against diversity; it is to say that the best stories require both insight and detachment, sensitivity and skill.
Two days before Soloway’s recent interview was published, Tambor won the Emmy for his performance for the second year in a row. In his speech, he told Hollywood to “give transgender talent a chance”, referring to himself, apologetically, as “a cisgender man”. You don’t hear many 72-year-olds talking like that. Transparent might not have entirely toppled the patriarchy. But, in Tambor, it showed you can still enlist the right man for the fight.
