Joey Soloway’s series about a Los Angeles parent who comes out as a woman late in life is funny, close and honest about how selfish love can make people. Jeffrey Tambor is careful and moving; her children are hard company, and meant to be.
Joey Soloway’s series is about a Los Angeles family called the Pfeffermans, and about the parent who has spent a lifetime being Mort to them and would now like to be Maura. Jeffrey Tambor plays her. The three children are grown, unhappy and expensive to run, and the first ten half-hour episodes follow what happens when Maura tries to tell them and they are too busy to hear. It is the kind of family comedy that does not much like the family, and we recommend it with one caveat: the Pfefferman children are hard company, and there are evenings when thirty minutes with them is enough.
Tambor plays Maura small. She has rehearsed this conversation for years and still cannot get it out; at the dinner that opens the series she has all three of them in one room, the ribs on the table, and the talk turns to who will inherit the house before she has said a word. Later in the first episode Sarah (Amy Landecker) lets herself into the house with an old girlfriend, Tammy Cashman (Melora Hardin), and finds her father in a dress. Tambor does not move. Landecker’s face goes through shock, recognition and something like relief, and Tambor simply waits to see which one will win. We were moved more than we expected to be, and it was the waiting that did it: a person who has been afraid for most of a life finding that the moment is smaller than the fear.
The children are the joke and the problem. Sarah has a husband, two children and a life she walks out of the minute Tammy reappears. Josh (Jay Duplass) works in music and is sleeping with a singer half his age. Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) has no job, no plan and a standing arrangement with her father’s chequebook. All three actors play selfishness as a habit rather than a decision, which is harder and truer, and Hoffmann in particular makes Ali’s floundering funny without asking us to forgive it. Judith Light, as their mother Shelly, arrives late in the first episode and takes the air out of every room she enters.
Soloway directs several episodes and sets the style: handheld camera, daylight through blinds, a lens that drifts towards whichever face is lying. The house is shot as a place everyone wants and nobody looks after. The music is mostly piano, quiet, and it stays out of the way. Later episodes fold in flashbacks to the children’s childhood, with Zander Faden as the young Josh, and the list of directors grows to take in Andrea Arnold, So Yong Kim, Sarah Gavron and Marielle Heller, which tells you what the series thought it was: a set of short films that happen to share a family. The writers, among them Faith Soloway, Bridget Bedard, Jessi Klein and Gabe Liedman, keep the dialogue overlapping and unfinished, the way families talk when nobody is listening.
It has faults. The Pfeffermans never worry about money, so every crisis is a crisis of feeling, and after a few episodes we wanted someone to have a bill they could not pay. The dialogue reaches for poetry in scenes that did not need it, and everyone has had enough therapy to describe their own patterns out loud. We laughed at Josh’s disasters and then felt slightly ashamed, because the series had made it plain he could not help himself. And casting an actor who has lived as a man in the part of a trans woman is a choice we would not make; Tambor is careful and good, and the question does not go away.
Family comedies usually want you to end up liking everyone. This one does not much care whether you do, and that is why it feels honest. Most critics have been warm and we agree with them, with a shade less patience for the children than some. The series runs to five seasons, the fifth of them a single episode. The first ten remain the ones we would send you to.
Watch two at a time. Half an hour is enough to make you angry with a Pfefferman and an hour is enough to forgive one. The 18 certificate is earned, mostly by Josh.
