This series is surprisingly bizarre. The summary of it is explicit and at the same time evasive. It does not really describe the atmosphere and meaning of this altogether queer – the queer of LGBTQ – sitcom.
"When the Pfefferman family patriarch makes a dramatic admission, the entire family's secrets start to spill out, and each of them spins in a different direction as they begin to figure out who they are going to become. Starring Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, and Gaby Hoffman."
As you find out by just reading that summary, it does not mention we are dealing with a Jewish family. That implies some cultural, social and ideological, not to mention religious, elements that structure and construct the meaning of the series. In the same way, it does not mention the fact the "family patriarch" was a university professor and researcher and has now retired. He was and still is an intellectual that provided and still provides his family with a tremendous level of financial and economic resources. That creates real and devastating dependency in the members of the family. They are from beginning to end enslaved to the father, in a Jewish family where the Jewishness is transmitted by the mother and in a community where the rabbi is a woman.
Think then of the meaning of the father (by the way the real patriarch is the grandfather who is buried in the last episode) deciding to become a trans woman in his late sixties. It is a challenge to the Jewish character of his wife since he is not divorced. It is a challenge to his secondary Jewish relation to his children who are Jewish because their mother is Jewish and this fact cannot be changed by the decision of the father to define himself as a woman though he remains on the trans-vestite side of his trans approach of his gender rather than on the trans-hormonal side. That only makes the necessary adjustments of the other family members' approaches of their husband or father quite superficial since it is only changing the gender of the pronouns used for any reference to him, sorry her. He remains a HE under a SHE surface, and the mother does not seem to be able to change her pronominal reference to HIM, not HER.
That makes his move quite pathetic and the wife is quite justified in her just standing on the side, watchful, curious, intrigued and after all nothing else, certainly not supportive.
The three children are quite special.
The elder daughter defines herself as a lesbian and reveals she has always been and she steals her unique lesbian partner from her own marriage in what becomes a mid-life crisis, supported by the father who gives this lesbian couple the family house after he has moved out of it. She is possessive and at the same time she regrets and maybe nostalgically dreams of her ex-husband since she gets a divorce from him, but he is fluid enough to let her (them) have the children of their marriage quite often. He does not seem to really resent the strange situation his ex-wife has created.
The second child, the son, is a greedy sentimental love addict, in fact not love really but only his hormonal outlets that have to be numerous and frequent. He is an authoritarian and possessive music manager fired from the label he was working for but then he is financed by his father to start his own label. He supposedly falls in love with the female rabbi of the community but he is untrustworthy with her and she – let's hope – is clear enough to know that one missed rendezvous is forgivable but a second is not and yet she only seems to finally walk away after a third unfaithful episode more or less amplified by his younger sister's gossiping. He has a propensity to invite his ex-lovers, at least some of them, to his family happenings even when he is supposed to concentrate on the rabbi he has declared his first and only real love. What's more, the series will grant him a very contradictory present: an undeclared and so far unrecognized and unclaimed son. To jump from being the permanent and flippant oats-sower for more than twenty years to being the father of an adult son is majestically iconoclastic since this son is a Christian and he says graces before eating, which is not exactly the fashion in this Jewish family.
The last child of this triad is a younger daughter who is absolutely unable to keep to one objective and one plan for more than six months in her life. She is entirely covered and financed by the father in all her attempts at occupying her free time with entertaining activities that never last long. What's more, she is a very vicious – though only half conscious – gossip that loves revealing things that are both half true and half false to people who should be protected from those nasty revelations. She hurts everyone around her and then she humbly begs like a puppy for everyone to forgive her and take her back under their protection and their financing.
So the superficial gender trans-formation of the father in that situation is more a gadget than a real deeply explored change. As a sitcom, it is nicely entertaining but it is also quite circumstantial and thus lacks real matter.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
"When the Pfefferman family patriarch makes a dramatic admission, the entire family's secrets start to spill out, and each of them spins in a different direction as they begin to figure out who they are going to become. Starring Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, and Gaby Hoffman."
As you find out by just reading that summary, it does not mention we are dealing with a Jewish family. That implies some cultural, social and ideological, not to mention religious, elements that structure and construct the meaning of the series. In the same way, it does not mention the fact the "family patriarch" was a university professor and researcher and has now retired. He was and still is an intellectual that provided and still provides his family with a tremendous level of financial and economic resources. That creates real and devastating dependency in the members of the family. They are from beginning to end enslaved to the father, in a Jewish family where the Jewishness is transmitted by the mother and in a community where the rabbi is a woman.
Think then of the meaning of the father (by the way the real patriarch is the grandfather who is buried in the last episode) deciding to become a trans woman in his late sixties. It is a challenge to the Jewish character of his wife since he is not divorced. It is a challenge to his secondary Jewish relation to his children who are Jewish because their mother is Jewish and this fact cannot be changed by the decision of the father to define himself as a woman though he remains on the trans-vestite side of his trans approach of his gender rather than on the trans-hormonal side. That only makes the necessary adjustments of the other family members' approaches of their husband or father quite superficial since it is only changing the gender of the pronouns used for any reference to him, sorry her. He remains a HE under a SHE surface, and the mother does not seem to be able to change her pronominal reference to HIM, not HER.
That makes his move quite pathetic and the wife is quite justified in her just standing on the side, watchful, curious, intrigued and after all nothing else, certainly not supportive.
The three children are quite special.
The elder daughter defines herself as a lesbian and reveals she has always been and she steals her unique lesbian partner from her own marriage in what becomes a mid-life crisis, supported by the father who gives this lesbian couple the family house after he has moved out of it. She is possessive and at the same time she regrets and maybe nostalgically dreams of her ex-husband since she gets a divorce from him, but he is fluid enough to let her (them) have the children of their marriage quite often. He does not seem to really resent the strange situation his ex-wife has created.
The second child, the son, is a greedy sentimental love addict, in fact not love really but only his hormonal outlets that have to be numerous and frequent. He is an authoritarian and possessive music manager fired from the label he was working for but then he is financed by his father to start his own label. He supposedly falls in love with the female rabbi of the community but he is untrustworthy with her and she – let's hope – is clear enough to know that one missed rendezvous is forgivable but a second is not and yet she only seems to finally walk away after a third unfaithful episode more or less amplified by his younger sister's gossiping. He has a propensity to invite his ex-lovers, at least some of them, to his family happenings even when he is supposed to concentrate on the rabbi he has declared his first and only real love. What's more, the series will grant him a very contradictory present: an undeclared and so far unrecognized and unclaimed son. To jump from being the permanent and flippant oats-sower for more than twenty years to being the father of an adult son is majestically iconoclastic since this son is a Christian and he says graces before eating, which is not exactly the fashion in this Jewish family.
The last child of this triad is a younger daughter who is absolutely unable to keep to one objective and one plan for more than six months in her life. She is entirely covered and financed by the father in all her attempts at occupying her free time with entertaining activities that never last long. What's more, she is a very vicious – though only half conscious – gossip that loves revealing things that are both half true and half false to people who should be protected from those nasty revelations. She hurts everyone around her and then she humbly begs like a puppy for everyone to forgive her and take her back under their protection and their financing.
So the superficial gender trans-formation of the father in that situation is more a gadget than a real deeply explored change. As a sitcom, it is nicely entertaining but it is also quite circumstantial and thus lacks real matter.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU