Interview [Written]: Jill Soloway

Excellent interview in Vulture this week with Jill Soloway, writer-producer on several TV series including Six Feet Under, United States of Tara, and How to Make It in America, and the new Amazon series Transparent.

So much of the conversations about your show are about Jeffrey Tambor’s transgender parent, but I want to talk about the family dynamics and about how family members fight and speak to each other. How much of that was an important organizing principle of the show?
We talk a lot about this thing that we call the “ring of light,” which sounds super serious for a comedy show, but I imagine in my brain that all five Pfeffermans are holding onto this life preserver, this ring-shaped thing, that keeps them connected, [which] they don’t quite understand. It has a lot to do with boundaries and secrets and blood and legacy and connection. And the show is really about understanding who they are in relationship to that ring.

And what does that mean in terms of the way you write the show and the way you think about these characters interacting?
So, I’m constantly thinking about moving around this circle and moving perspective from person to person. In most shows, there’s usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. And one of the things I’m trying to do with the show is constantly move the needle so that you’re not sure whom you’re rooting for. And even when you might be rooting for one person in the beginning of the show, by the time you get to the middle of the show or the next episode, you’ve turned on them and moved onto somebody else in the family that you’re rooting for.

Is that a consequence of the way that you like to tell stories, or is it almost as if you’re reacting to the way everybody does tell stories?
There are some shows that I grew up watching that did this kind of storytelling unconsciously. I think about shows like Family or Eight Is Enough. Shows like Thirtysomething, where they had that kind of delicious, yummy, soap-y, I-can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next thing along with a feeling of a close tribe, people who really need each other. So it has been done before. I don’t think I’m inventing anything.

The one thing that was a goal for me was in looking at shows like Louie and shows like Girls, where I was just so envious of the kind of unlikability of Louie or Hannah Horvath, and I really had worked so hard in network television to get things made and was constantly getting the likebility note. One of the things I spoke about early on is that this would be about five people who are all sort of equally lovable and also unlikable, that five people would have that kind of horrible, narcissistic, depressive, “I-can’t-stand-myself-but-I-can’t-stop-talking-about-myself” post-millennial malaise. And the idea of it as a circle where it’s constantly moving, it just really made sense here. I also think about this idea of the heroine’s journey as different from the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey follows a very specific Joseph Campbellian arc, and I don’t really know what the heroine’s journey is, and most of the time I’m just kind of making it up to see how it sounds.

But you know what it isn’t?
I know what it isn’t, and it doesn’t move in an arc, and it does move in spirals.

Here is a trailer for Transparent:

To read the rest of the interview, go here.