‘Transparent’ Returns for Season 2 Even More Beautiful and Daring, Somehow

It’s easy to get caught up in the ground being broken with Transparent, the award-winning sitcom (though half-hour drama might be the more applicable genre tag) that returns with its second season on December 11th; a major television series with a transgender woman as its central character is a trailblazer in the truest sense. But with its second season, Transparent might be proving more ambitious than we’d even expected. Amazon made the first episode of Season 2 available tonight, and even just thirty minutes into the new season, you’re hit with the realization that this show isn’t just remarkable for its transgender protagonist. At present, Transparent is as captivating and audacious as anything on television.

The season 2 premiere episode, “Kina Hora” — stream it on Amazon Prime Video — throws us right back into the fray with the Pfefferman clan, and their vision of family that is at once suffocating and invigorating. That trailer that circulated a few weeks ago, with the Pfeffermans chaotically lining up for a family photograph at Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Tammy’s (Melora Hardin) wedding, is effectively the season’s cold open, and in one scene, the entirety of the show’s appeal comes into, if you’ll pardon the pun, focus. Like Robert Altman at a Jewish wedding or a Christopher Guest mockumentary about … well, a Jewish wedding (look, it’s what’s happening in the scene), the chaos breeds laughs, character beats both large and small, and the ever-present sense of a family that can’t get out of their own way long enough to appreciate each other’s flawed beauty.

If this all sounds artsier than the Transparent you remember from season 1, it kind of is. The ambition on display in “Kina Hora” isn’t just about Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) navigating her own changes while beset by selfish children, vicious siblings, and a photographer who won’t use the correct pronouns. Writer/director Jill Soloway plays with things like atmosphere — the suffocating shades of white at Sarah and Tammy’s achingly bohemian nuptials — and perspective, and then with no warning at all, shoots us into a seemingly unrelated flashback to Berlin in 1933. It’s a scene straight out of Isherwood, or the gay fantasia of Tony Kushner’s vision of heaven brought to life, all racial impurity and gender confusion, and it settles on a trans woman played by Hari Nef. The scene comes and goes without comment by the rest of the story, to the point where you could convince yourself you hallucinated it. But Nef’s character recurs at episode’s end, as a kind of apparition, the ghost of transgender past. More than anything else, it’s a clear signal that Soloway isn’t going to be content to merely plumb the depths of the Pfeffermans’ neuroses. The past is going to have much to say about the family’s present.

Those aforementioned neuroses, however, are on full display in Season 2, and if you found Maura and Shelly’s (Judith Light) children hard to take last season, you’re in for more of the same. Personally, I love them even when I don’t like them, which to me feels like family. They’re selfish and maddening and phenomenally acted. Landecker gets the spotlight moment in the season premiere, but Gaby Hoffmann and Jay Duplass do some great work from the sidelines, and they’re joined by Kathryn Hahn’s Rabbi Raquel, who might be the true audience surrogate amid the chaos.

It’s these chaotic scenes, also, that make Jeffrey Tambor’s still-waters performance as Maura stand out all the more spectacularly. Whereas in season 1, there was a lot of articulating that had to be done about Maura’s choices and circumstances and intentions, the early part of season 2 allows Maura a lot of silences, and it’s in those silences that Tambor delivers so much. I found myself rewinding shots of Maura looking at other characters because there were so many things happening on her face at the same time I couldn’t clock them all.

What I’m saying is, get excited. If you found yourselves charmed and moved by Transparent in its first season, I would be ready to jump right back in. This feels like a show that’s ready to make a big artistic leap in its sophomore year.

[Watch the Transparent Season 2 premiere episode, “Kina Hora,” on Amazon Prime Video]