In Transparent season 3, a fragile family gropes for a new identity

The Pfeffermans are stripped of old labels, so they have to create new ones

Transparent, season three.
(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

The third season of Transparent drops on Amazon today, less than a week after Jeffrey Tambor accepted an Emmy for his portrayal of Maura Pfefferman and showrunner Jill Soloway won for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. The new season doesn't disappoint. This is a gorgeous show, a show that deploys its symbols with a slapdash confidence that lets them sing — sometimes through that retrograde filter the nuclear family acquires as it recedes nostalgically into the past, but sometimes also through flashbacks that do the opposite, that highlight the lonely exceptionalism that plagues anyone who thinks too hard about sex or history.

Transparent's first season sank its teeth into the shock of transitioning — not just through Maura, through the entire Pfefferman clan. It explored the limits of the family's liberal, Jewish, cosmopolitan goodwill. What made Transparent remarkable was its investigation of how the Pfeffermans worked to reconcile their abstract theories of themselves as totally accepting people into a family unit that (like all families) is, at times, far from tolerant. Families squabble. Habits of long standing are hard to break. Children are solipsistic and selfish around their parents even as adults, and parents can be just as solipsistic and selfish as they try to shrug off or even eliminate the parameters they themselves built. The Pfefferman house is gorgeous. It also weighs a symbolic ton.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.