Transparent

A lot of song and dance, some of which is drenched in self-absorbed sap and some of which is wildly and satisfyingly jubilant, with thoughtful and often clever music written by Soloway’s composer sister, Faith Soloway. ... The show struggles to find a way to meaningfully wrap up the Pfefferman siblings’ stories, whether sung or spoken, but the actors put considerable effort into bringing “Musicale Finale” to its fullest vision.

[Transparent] finishes not with a whimper but a choreographed musical number titled “Joyocaust.” It’s the climax of a movie-length “Musicale Finale” that works its way through various stages of OK-ness to crescendo with something so enthusiastically, earnestly nuts it achieves a kind of transcendence.

Transparent has always been about surviving cataclysms and leaning into change. “Musicale Finale” makes a bighearted attempt along those lines, if not an entirely successful one. Songs written by Soloway’s sister Faith pleasantly sing-rather-than-show a series of final transformations for the characters. The lyrics get so hyperbolic as to seem trolling, but there’s just not much drama. Fine actors who once expressed complex emotions in charmingly messy cross talk now spend too much time shouting out slogans as if they were Elsa of Arendelle. The ideas powering the show remain interesting, though.

It’s all over the map narratively and tonally, and fans of characters like Sarah or Josh or Shea will feel frustrated with how little they get to do in the allotted time. But what would a farewell to Transparent be if it wasn’t equal parts clever and exasperating, delightful and baffling? ... It’s a valiant, well-meaning effort.

As it turns out, an hour and 40 minutes is at once plenty of time to cram in a season’s worth of family drama—starting with Maura’s will and the realization that Shelly and her kids never really knew Maura’s wishes, certainly not in life—and not quite enough to keep some characters from getting the narrative short shrift.

Each over-the-top Broadway-style banger feels earnest, awkward, clumsy, and a tad self-serving. ... This is destined to stand out as one of the small screen’s stranger things.

It just doesn’t add up, whether you look at it from a practical standpoint or a broader figurative assessment. The “Transparent” finale feels like a desperate flailing for attention that betrays what the show did best and, worse still, such contradictory pomp comes from a series that knows it should’ve gone quietly into the night, rather than clawing tooth and nail for another day of sun.

What we get feels and even looks, thanks to some jarring editing, like a rush job. Sarah and Josh’s stories in particular are foreshortened. ... It doesn’t become more than a collection of moments, some transporting, some throwaway.

A self-indulgent experiment egregious even for the most self-indulgent characters on television, Musicale Finale feels hastily composed, a tacked-on coda from a visionary who has already moved onto brighter horizons, such as the underrated I Love Dick. Truthfully, few of the actors seem prepared for their big numbers.

There is a lot about it that doesn’t quite work, specifically pretty much the entire first half of it. But the fact that it doesn’t all work is part of what makes this an appropriate farewell. The Musicale Finale takes what can be frustrating about Transparent and what’s also so sublime and lovely about it, then distills all of that into a single song-and-dance-filled curtain call.

There’s a pointlessness to the whole enterprise here, a sense that one’s last looks at characters who were uniquely well-drawn and carefully wrought are being dithered away on a theatrical framework that requires so much jerry-rigging to make sense that moments and interactions are slipping away.