\n<\/p>\n
\u201cClean Slate,\u201d on Amazon Prime Video, is the kind of comedy you\u2019ve seen on TV before. A woman leaves her hectic life in New York City for her hometown in Alabama to make a fresh start, repair her relationship with her estranged father, work at the family carwash and, just maybe, find love.<\/p>\n
The first season is a tall glass of sweet tea \u2014 wholesome, a little saccharine and mostly sitcom-standard. Except for one thing: Desiree (Laverne Cox) is transgender, which is a revelation to her gruff, old-school dad, Harry (George Wallace), who last saw her 23 years ago as his \u201cson,\u201d Desmond.<\/p>\n
What might be most striking about \u201cClean Slate\u201d is how un-fraught the situation is. After his initial surprise and a few pronoun faux pas, Harry takes his daughter\u2019s identity in stride. So do their friends and neighbors (except for one moralizing preacher). Though the show was co-produced by the late Norman Lear, there is little of the acrimony of his 1970s culture-clash sitcoms like \u201cAll in the Family.\u201d<\/p>\n
The statement, and maybe the fantasy, of the show is to posit a world that largely, casually assumes transgender rights and personhood, even as the headlines from our actual world scream otherwise. Our social problems aren\u2019t absent in \u201cClean Slate\u201d; at one point, in a burst of fatherly protectiveness, Harry worries that \u201cthese streets are not safe for people like Des.\u201d But mostly, the show sticks to quirky family comedy and good-natured wisecracks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The kind of transformation that \u201cClean Slate\u201d imagines \u2014 the movement of a group from controversial to ordinary \u2014 is one we\u2019ve seen in other areas of society, most recently around gay rights. That change was itself driven in part by TV shows.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
ABC gave us \u201cEllen,\u201d<\/a> NBC gave us \u201cWill & Grace,\u201d<\/a> Bravo gave us \u201cQueer Eye for the Straight Guy,\u201d<\/a> and eventually the Supreme Court gave us marriage equality. When Joe Biden, as vice president in 2012, declared his support for gay marriage rights, he said<\/a>, \u201cI think \u2018Will & Grace\u2019 probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody\u2019s ever done so far.\u201d<\/p>\n Can American TV do the same for transgender Americans? And if it hasn\u2019t \u2014 or if it can\u2019t \u2014 does that say more about the issue itself or the changing state of the media?<\/p>\n As of this year, we\u2019re a decade out from the 2015 premieres of \u201cI Am Cait\u201d and \u201cI Am Jazz,\u201d two high-profile cable reality series about transgender protagonists (Caitlyn Jenner of Olympics and Kardashians fame and Jazz Jennings, then a teenager).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Before those came \u201cTransparent,\u201d also on Amazon, and \u201cOrange Is the New Black,\u201d the Netflix prison dramedy that made Cox a star. (She was on the cover of Time magazine in 2014 as the face of \u201cThe Transgender Tipping Point.\u201d<\/a>) Afterward came \u201cPose,\u201d about the 1980s and 1990s New York City ballroom scene, as well as \u201cDoubt,\u201d<\/a> a CBS drama in which Cox played a lawyer. Over the years, trans characters also joined hit series like \u201cGlee\u201d and reality shows like the enduring \u201cRuPaul\u2019s Drag Race.\u201d<\/p>\n But despite more than a decade of TV advances, \u201cClean Slate\u201d arrives at a moment of offscreen retrenchment. The Trump administration has attacked what it terms \u201cgender ideology\u201d with punitive zeal. It has vowed to ban transgender service members<\/a> from the military. Transgender citizens have had passports issued<\/a> that identify them by their sex assigned at birth. And at least some public polling<\/a> has shown a recent drop in acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n All this would seem to go against the popular truism, backed by academic study<\/a>, that TV familiarity leads to real-life progress. The working-woman sitcoms of the 1970s \u2014 \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show,\u201d \u201cAlice,\u201d \u201cOne Day at a Time\u201d \u2014 got audiences to identify with women who had careers outside the home. Sitcoms like \u201cJulia\u201d and \u201cThe Cosby Show\u201d familiarized white viewers with middle-class Black families.<\/p>\n The more Americans experience the world through their parasocial relationships with TV characters \u2014 whom people get to know over years, unlike movie characters \u2014 the more TV becomes a second neighborhood to them. If viewers didn\u2019t know a Black entrepreneur, they knew George Jefferson on Lear\u2019s \u201cThe Jeffersons\u201d; if they didn\u2019t know an interracial couple, they knew George\u2019s neighbors<\/a>, Tom and Helen Willis.<\/p>\n In the case of gay characters, greater acceptance was followed by greater real-life openness. A recent Gallup analysis shows that nearly one in 10<\/a> American adults identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., almost triple the share in 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After a long history of pop-culture representations of transgender people as villainous or disordered, the past decade of TV has found space<\/a> to make these characters full people rather than curiosities. And rewatched amid today\u2019s political backlash, the shows can already feel like artifacts of a bygone era.<\/p>\n Cox\u2019s character on \u201cOrange,\u201d Sophia, asserted her identity in the face of slurs and harassment in a federal women\u2019s penitentiary; now the Trump administration has moved<\/a> to transfer transgender women to men\u2019s prisons (the order has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge). \u201cPose\u201d chronicled the centrality of transgender New Yorkers to the culture and activism of the 1980s and 1990s; the National Park Service recently removed the word \u201ctransgender\u201d<\/a> from a web page on the 1969 Stonewall protests. A flashback arc<\/a> on \u201cTransparent\u201d depicted transgender culture in Weimar Germany and the assault on it by the Nazis, a chilling example of how bigotry can be used as a political cudgel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even on TV, there have been steps back. Despite the past decade of high-profile trans stories on TV, a 2023-24 study by the GLAAD Media Institute<\/a> found a decline in transgender characters for the second consecutive year. Recently, Disney removed references<\/a> to a trans character\u2019s gender identity in \u201cWin or Lose,\u201d a Pixar series about a school softball team.<\/p>\n Given TV\u2019s history of helping usher in real-world acceptance in so many areas, why, after more than a decade of TV representation, would transgender Americans be losing ground? I\u2019m not a sociologist or a political scientist, but as a culture critic, I have to wonder if at least one factor is a phenomenon that has changed almost every aspect of media in the 21st century: the fragmentation of the audience.<\/p>\n The TV-driven social advances of the 20th century were an effort of creative idealism. But they were also a product of the 20th-century media monoculture, in which a few broadcast networks monopolized the viewing public. \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show\u201d and \u201cThe Jeffersons\u201d had audiences that dwarfed the most popular TV shows of today; even \u201cWill & Grace\u201d premiered the year before the arrival of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d led to a deluge of cable programming that further divided the mass audience into segments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When everybody watched the same shows, everybody \u2014 of different demographics, beliefs and lifestyles \u2014 met Mary Richards, George Jefferson and Will Truman together. By the 2010s, this wasn\u2019t the case with \u201cI Am Cait\u201d or \u201cOrange Is the New Black,\u201d however much buzz as these shows got. (And with streaming series like \u201cClean Slate,\u201d it\u2019s hard to get definitive numbers<\/a> on how many people are watching anything, period.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not only were the audiences different. So was the process of discovery, especially as streaming became dominant. In the late 1990s, you might watch \u201cWill & Grace\u201d not because you thought one thing or another of its premise but because it was between two other shows you watched on NBC. You found it; you laughed; it became a habit.<\/p>\n In the streaming era, you have to seek out every show individually, or have it recommended to you by the algorithm because you liked something similar. This becomes a mechanism for, if not preaching to the converted, then at least reaching to the already receptive.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that with the loss of the monoculture and the spread of individual media spheres, TV has also lost its ability to broadly move society \u2014 on tolerance, politics or anything else. Progress, in the era of binge TV and TikTok, might now come pointillistically, bubble by bubble.<\/p>\n This is one possibility. Another, one more hopeful for shows like \u201cClean Slate,\u201d is that many of the past shows that changed social attitudes were not intense stories like \u201cTransparent\u201d and \u201cPose,\u201d or emotional celebrity docuseries like \u201cI Am Cait,\u201d but lighthearted sitcoms. The history of American TV is that social progress often sneaks in alongside wacky misunderstandings and dad jokes.<\/p>\n This could be the promise of \u201cClean Slate\u201d \u2014 or the transgender sitcom after it, or the one after that. Strictly as a comedy, \u201cClean Slate\u201d is good-hearted and affectionate but not especially innovative. But sometimes the power of sitcoms is to show you a big change in such a way that you could swear you\u2019ve seen it a million times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n