At first when Maura, the main character in Amazon’s groundbreaking new series Transparent, she’s Mort Pfefferman, having her three grown children over for a chaotic family dinner.Looking new-agey and loving in pink button-down, ponytail and pinkie ring, she reveals in idle pre-dinner chatter that she’s broken up with her latest girlfriend to her kids. “I’m fine, I’m better, actually,” she says. Though the audience sees something deeper brewing, her children just see their ladies’ man of a dad, having broken another heart. Maura, who has been hiding her whole life, has committed to her LGBT support group to reveal her identity to her family. This is the world of Transparent, a daring leap into original programming for Amazon Studios. The Pfeffermans are L.A.-based, endearingly dysfunctional, and they clearly love each other despite their squabbles, not unlike the Fishers. These characters, too, wrestle with secret identities. Maura coming out as transgender, her son Josh’s (Jay Duplass) complicated, ongoing affair with an older former babysitter, her daughter Sarah’s (Amy Landecker) affair with a former lover from college, who is a woman, to name a few.
