Can we all just agree that Transparent Musicale Finale is a bit OTT? Okay maybe I am going overboard but that’s a given, because that this 100-minute installment acts as the final gear for Jill Soloway’s exceptional series.
A fifth season was decided on August 2017, just three months before lead actor Jeffrey Tambor was alleged of sexual harassment by his former assistant Van Barnes and co-star Trace Lysette.
Tambor was officially sacked from the series in February 2018. In May of that year, Soloway revealed the show would end with season five, which had to be eventually ended with a single finale episode.
But it also widened TV’s ambitions. It was not Amazon’s debut show, but it was its pathway to its first critical acclaim, much like “Orange Is the New Black” on Netflix. (“Orange” was also an early series to show a transgender character, and surprisingly it was not a coincidence that it took a new format to reflect this new awareness.)
If “Orange” was about streaming could produce a more expansive, broad-canvas kind of TV, “Transparent” showed it could also create a more particular, intricate granular form of art.
It was a big Jewish family debate of a show, passionate in its voice and powerful in its grace. It was a tribute to life as a continuing classroom, a poem about its ordeals and the task of being honest with the world and one’s self.
It sounds mouthwatering to cut this final off from the rest of the show, to treat it like a luxury montage, an alternative ending, a fanfic version.
But that also would seem considerably wrong. “Musicale Finale” is an ending that strayed away somehow. But somehow manages to retain the essence and soul of “Transparent,” which has always advocated one thing– accept the mess you are to move on.
