“Clean Slate,” on Amazon Prime Video, is the kind of comedy you’ve 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.
The first season is a tall glass of sweet tea — 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 “son,” Desmond.
What might be most striking about “Clean Slate” is how un-fraught the situation is. After his initial surprise and a few pronoun faux pas, Harry takes his daughter’s 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 “All in the Family.”
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’t absent in “Clean Slate”; at one point, in a burst of fatherly protectiveness, Harry worries that “these streets are not safe for people like Des.” But mostly, the show sticks to quirky family comedy and good-natured wisecracks.
The kind of transformation that “Clean Slate” imagines — the movement of a group from controversial to ordinary — is one we’ve seen in other areas of society, most recently around gay rights. That change was itself driven in part by TV shows.
ABC gave us “Ellen,” NBC gave us “Will & Grace,” Bravo gave us “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” 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, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.”
Can American TV do the same for transgender Americans? And if it hasn’t — or if it can’t — does that say more about the issue itself or the changing state of the media?
As of this year, we’re a decade out from the 2015 premieres of “I Am Cait” and “I Am Jazz,” two high-profile cable reality series about transgender protagonists (Caitlyn Jenner of Olympics and Kardashians fame and Jazz Jennings, then a teenager).
Before those came “Transparent,” also on Amazon, and “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix prison dramedy that made Cox a star. (She was on the cover of Time magazine in 2014 as the face of “The Transgender Tipping Point.”) Afterward came “Pose,” about the 1980s and 1990s New York City ballroom scene, as well as “Doubt,” a CBS drama in which Cox played a lawyer. Over the years, trans characters also joined hit series like “Glee” and reality shows like the enduring “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
But despite more than a decade of TV advances, “Clean Slate” arrives at a moment of offscreen retrenchment. The Trump administration has attacked what it terms “gender ideology” with punitive zeal. It has vowed to ban transgender service members from the military. Transgender citizens have had passports issued that identify them by their sex assigned at birth. And at least some public polling has shown a recent drop in acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people.
All this would seem to go against the popular truism, backed by academic study, that TV familiarity leads to real-life progress. The working-woman sitcoms of the 1970s — “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Alice,” “One Day at a Time” — got audiences to identify with women who had careers outside the home. Sitcoms like “Julia” and “The Cosby Show” familiarized white viewers with middle-class Black families.
The more Americans experience the world through their parasocial relationships with TV characters — whom people get to know over years, unlike movie characters — the more TV becomes a second neighborhood to them. If viewers didn’t know a Black entrepreneur, they knew George Jefferson on Lear’s “The Jeffersons”; if they didn’t know an interracial couple, they knew George’s neighbors, Tom and Helen Willis.
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 American adults identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., almost triple the share in 2012.
After a long history of pop-culture representations of transgender people as villainous or disordered, the past decade of TV has found space to make these characters full people rather than curiosities. And rewatched amid today’s political backlash, the shows can already feel like artifacts of a bygone era.
Cox’s character on “Orange,” Sophia, asserted her identity in the face of slurs and harassment in a federal women’s penitentiary; now the Trump administration has moved to transfer transgender women to men’s prisons (the order has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge). “Pose” 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 “transgender” from a web page on the 1969 Stonewall protests. A flashback arc on “Transparent” 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.
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 found a decline in transgender characters for the second consecutive year. Recently, Disney removed references to a trans character’s gender identity in “Win or Lose,” a Pixar series about a school softball team.
Given TV’s 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’m 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.
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. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Jeffersons” had audiences that dwarfed the most popular TV shows of today; even “Will & Grace” premiered the year before the arrival of “The Sopranos” led to a deluge of cable programming that further divided the mass audience into segments.
When everybody watched the same shows, everybody — of different demographics, beliefs and lifestyles — met Mary Richards, George Jefferson and Will Truman together. By the 2010s, this wasn’t the case with “I Am Cait” or “Orange Is the New Black,” however much buzz as these shows got. (And with streaming series like “Clean Slate,” it’s hard to get definitive numbers on how many people are watching anything, period.)
Not only were the audiences different. So was the process of discovery, especially as streaming became dominant. In the late 1990s, you might watch “Will & Grace” 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.
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.
It’s 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 — on tolerance, politics or anything else. Progress, in the era of binge TV and TikTok, might now come pointillistically, bubble by bubble.
This is one possibility. Another, one more hopeful for shows like “Clean Slate,” is that many of the past shows that changed social attitudes were not intense stories like “Transparent” and “Pose,” or emotional celebrity docuseries like “I Am Cait,” but lighthearted sitcoms. The history of American TV is that social progress often sneaks in alongside wacky misunderstandings and dad jokes.
This could be the promise of “Clean Slate” — or the transgender sitcom after it, or the one after that. Strictly as a comedy, “Clean Slate” 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’ve seen it a million times.
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