Since fourth season of “Transparent” premiered in September 2017 and its star Jeffrey Tambor was fired amid allegations of sexual harassment a few months later, the future of the show has been a mystery. But both the show’s creator Jill Soloway and Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, confirmed at the Television Critics Association press tour that the show would return in the form of a musical movie.
“We would never have wanted to take a special, incredible show like that and just end it, unceremoniously. It was Jill’s idea to do a musical movie. And so, we signed off on that idea trusting her that she would come up with something incredible, which she did,” Salke said. “I think it’s going to be an incredible–and not just special because it’s creatively so wonderfully done and such an incredible team executing it–but it also brings the whole thing full circle at the end. I don’t want to give away much about it, but it does everything that you would want it to do, or at least that we wanted.”
Without addressing Tambor’s departure or how his character, Maura Pfefferman, would be written out, the creator provided some details on the just-wrapped movie.
“As my parent came out, the very first instinct I had before I wrote ‘Transparent’ was that my sister Faith and I were going to make a documentary musical. My sister Faith is an amazing musician and has been writing musicals for years, and as a family we were always doing musicals. Some people have said that ‘Transparent’ has always been a show that wanted to be a musical, because there’s these musical numbers,” Soloway said.
“When everything went down last year and we lost Jeffrey Tambor, and we went through so much as a family…there is no way to really kind of just go back to a plain old season five and try to just repair by going back,” Soloway continued. “We kind of dared ourselves to follow through and come through and take all of Faith’s songs that she had been writing for a possible ‘Transparent’ musical five years down the road on Broadway. We were able to do something that I feel like is going to astonish and reward fans, and was a way to take music and transform the family to be able to come together and have that feeling of, in some ways, transition. The show isn’t necessarily ending. It’s transitioning into a musical.”
No premiere date has been announced.
