In Television, timing is everything.
No series exemplifies this idiom more astonishingly than Transparent from Amazon Studios and it’s not even on-air. It’s online.
In January, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded Transparent a Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series, a history-making first win for a non-broadcast series that ushered in a new era of acceptance for transgendered people in media. (Actor Jeffrey Tambor also won Best Actor for his career-topping role.) Transparent is a watershed television show and a cultural Influencer, but most people haven’t even seen it… yet.
Transparent is lightning in a bottle: Writing. Casting. Production. Audience. Critical Response. Awards. Industry-wide admiration. One step has begat the next, and it all starts with the writer.
Writer/producer Jill Soloway (United States of Tara, Six Feet Under) created this seminal series from her own personal story which gives it complete authenticity and authenticity resonates with the audience. Transparent is a story that only Jill Soloway could tell because it’s the story of her own family, her parent.
Hollywood has taken notice, too. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.
On Fox, Glee prominently featured not one but two Trans-characters (one of whom can sing!).
ABC Family is producing My Transparent Life, a docu-series from Ryan Seacrest Productions that centres on a teenager whose parents divorce and whose father becomes a woman. A much-higher profile example is an E! docu-series starring Olympian Bruce Jenner, once the world’s greatest athlete and step-patriarch to those Kardashians, as he bravely chronicles his Trans Journey. Had Transparent not been so publicly embraced, I doubt he would have agreed to documenting his life so openly.
It seems the world is ready to know more. CBS, the most traditional mainstream network in the US, is producing Doubt, a one-hour legal drama pilot starring OITNB actor Laverne Cox as an attorney who is transgendered. That’s big.
Even movies are catching on: Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne’s next film, The Danish Girl, is a biopic of Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Scheduled for release in 2016, this film will receive worldwide distribution thanks to a television series that has already acquainted audiences with the subject matter.
All roads lead back to the timing and success of Transparent.
Amazon Studios is now a destination for creatives. The best and brightest (and bravest) want to work there, putting Amazon squarely at the epicenter of Hollywood. They even have an innovative Open Submissions Program. Every writer with a pilot script should be taking advantage of it: www.studios.amazon.com
Transparent accomplished all those feats and most people have never seen it. But they know it’s out there, online and setting trends.
(Steve La Rue is a Development Executive with 20+ years experience having championed such iconic series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Battlestar Galactica, and Farscape. His chill view of All Things Entertainment can be found at www.SurfingHollywood.com)
Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
