(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Amazon Prime pilot season is upon us once more. I haven't had a chance to watch most of them, but I watched and quite enjoyed the pilot of Transparent, and wanted to recommend it.

It stars Jeffrey Tambor (who is consistently amazing in two of my favorite sitcoms, The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development) as the patriarch of a highly dysfunctional California Jewish family. Since I watched it in the afterglow of making my "Tradition" fanvid, which positions the Bluths as a highly dysfunctional California Jewish family with Jeffrey Tambor as the patriarch, I couldn't help but read the show as a sort of remake or reinterpretation of Arrested Development. Tonally, the show is very different, but the family structure has some similarities.

But I really enjoyed the family interplay, the outbursts of broken Yiddish, and most of all, the promise that this is a loving show about failure. I expect that in subsequent episodes these characters will fail again and again to connect as a family, fail professionally, fail personally, fail romantically, and the show will treat their failure sympathetically and laugh with them, not at them. I really hope this pilot gets picked up because I am looking forward to rooting hopelessly for them to make it all work.

Comments

[morbane]

The sense of survivable failure - of failure in humorous context - was one of the things that I most enjoyed about Arrested Development [after I got over the shock of all the embarrassment]. Thanks for the review - I'll make a note of this.

[seekingferret]

Yeah... I mean, definitely don't make the mistake of expecting the same kind of show as Arrested Development, because it is very much not (Arrested Development tries desperately to make you laugh every three seconds, this show is willing to work for five minutes without a laugh to set up a single joke that just makes you smile knowingly but has deeper emotional bite), but I think you're right that telling stories about survivable failure is why Arrested Development can be so affecting despite how horrible its protagonists are. The Charlie Brown joke WORKS, you know, because it is so stark and ridiculous and yet true to how emotions affect us.