Transparent

There’s more to talk about here than the mystery of gender and relationships. Transparent is the best show we have right now about personal identity--of any and all human kinds.

Season 3 of Transparent is as excellent as ever, still better than pretty much everything else on TV, and exceptional in ways that are intrinsically tied to it being a third season.

Transparent’s status as a revolutionary show would not be as compelling (still compelling, but not in the same way) if it wasn’t bolstered by strong and innovative formal work. Its musical cues are as good as they come, and the realness of its scenes between actors doing exceptional work is accentuated by the fact that it feels like the camera is equally involved in the scene, making us feel present.

Season three of Jill Soloway's groundbreaking Transparent may turn out to be its funniest and most soulful yet. The head-on collision of self-absorbed entitlement with yearning solitude that has defined the fractious Pfeffermen clan from the start still sets off sparks of merciless hilarity, but it's the poignancy of their interconnected dysfunction that makes the show so compelling.

And yet for all its mess, for all its sprawl, for all its shagginess, Transparent remains one of TV’s most vital shows and one of its most artful.

In Season 3, the superb writing and performances make Transparent more satisfying than ever. If there's a standout, it's Light as Shelly, providing most of the comedy as Shelly works on her own one-woman show.

Back and as impressively irritating as ever.

Season three, so far, feels like it’s returning closer to that core mission after a second season that felt slightly less focused. Transitioning, for Maura and those who love her, is a process. Transparent season three shows us that the work is nowhere near done.

Based on the first three episodes, this looks like another finely crafted season. Also intense, uncompromising and demanding.

Perhaps what’s most admirable about the third season of Transparent is that it’s distinctly different than the first two: More formally daring than Season 1 and less structured than Season 2, Transparent continues to push boundaries in rewarding ways.

Season 3 lacks a certain narrative drive that the previous two seasons had, as if it’s enough to just hang out and observe these characters without any major new developments. And it mostly is--but still, there’s something missing.

While not quite reaching the heights of the show’s first season, Transparent manages to deliver something a little more fully formed and contained in season three.

Transparent has expanded from its first season’s examination of gender identity, and with that enlarged view come some growing pains. ... But the newest episodes of Transparent also display the perils of a producer reveling a tad too much in a show’s baroque period, particularly in the self-referential first episode, “Elizah.”