Transparent

Here is the Transparent: Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime) you dreamed of – heavy-going, light as a feather, uproarious and unbearably sad. Even its flaws are perfect. Thank. Non-binary. God.

Season two broadens its focus to the vast extended Pfefferman mishpocheh: children, in-laws, exes and long-gone ancestors. And it’s all the richer for it.

You're unlikely to watch a much better performance anywhere this year.

There are times when “Transparent” will run into a narrative convenience that it often seems too good for--someone stopping by a party at just the right time, someone running into someone in public, etc. Or a character will express something that seems just a bit too self-aware in an argument. I like these characters so much that I really just want to sit around and listen to them talk naturally to each other, examining the dynamics between one of the most fascinating families on TV.

Transparent returns for a second season with the Pfefferman family digging deeper into their pasts and struggling to make sense of their futures.... The dialogue can slash like a knife.

[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.

Excruciating 100-minute coda. ... In Musicale Finale, songs that issue straight from characters’ psyches destroy all perspective. Nothing ever cuts through the preciousness. Worse are the musical numbers themselves, which are clearly meant to be silly and self-aware but often land as unintentional self-parody anyway.