One of this year’s most critically acclaimed shows is not actually available on television. The comedy drama Transparent, featuring former Larry Sanders star Jeffrey Tambor, has done for Amazon’s on-demand TV service what Kevin Spacey’s much lauded House of Cards did for online rival Netflix.
Transparent’s creator Jill Soloway said: “As recently as three years ago, I was in meetings with TV executives saying, ‘You must have a straight white empathetic handsome hetero male as the centre of the show.
“’If you don’t have that, we can’t do your show. No, you can’t have women who are sexual, who aren’t super hot or skinny, who aren’t the object of a [heterosexual] male desire.’ I’ve longed to disrupt that.”
Transparent, starring Tambor as Mort, a divorced father of three who reveals to his family that he has been leading a hidden life as Maura, was greeted with almost universal acclaim – its 10 half hour episodes were released at once.
It was hailed as the first series to feature a fully rounded transgendered woman in a leading role (albeit played by a non-trans male actor) with 16 trans actors working on the first series and more than 50 trans people on the production. It will return for a second series next year.
“What Amazon offered was the chance to make a five-hour movie with distribution already built on. I was like, where do I sign?” said Soloway, whose debut feature film, Afternoon Delight, was released last year. “You have to scrape and beg to try to scrabble together a few hundred thousand dollars, and here we were handed the real thing.”
Transparent is the first breakout hit for Amazon in its on-demand TV wars with Netflix as it seeks to persuade would-be subscribers that its streaming video service is not only about films and archive TV shows.
“It’s the House of Cards for Amazon, the show that is getting people to say, ‘they are a quality service and you might want to subscribe to it’,” said Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s controller of drama commissioning, who is in discussions about a transgender drama for BBC1. “People have realised that stories are a great way of getting people to new services, but because there are so many services you have to aim to be really original, bold and authored. Those who struggle with the risk-taking of creativity will find that harder.”
It is also another sign of the shifting balance of power between film and TV. “It used to be the agent saying, ‘If everything goes well you’ll get a movie’ and they don’t say that anymore – it’s flipped. And that’s the big surprise. I never thought this would be the thing,” said Tambor.
“Actors are running now to content. Joe [Lewis, head of comedy at Amazon] has Malcolm McDowell, Gael García Bernal, John Goodman – they’re running over there because an actor will always go to a good script. And the revolution is here now and those not paying attention will go to the dinosaur area.”
McDowell and Bernal will star in Mozart in the Jungle, which emerged from the same pilot season as Transparent, while Goodman starred in Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau’s political satire Alpha House, Amazon’s debut original series last year.
Chris Bird, Amazon Prime Instant Video film and TV strategy director, said: “There are very few places in the world where a show like Transparent could be made. We want to listen to writers and creatives who have big, bold, exciting ideas.”
Amazon’s next big launch – and the first to come out of the UK – will be Ripper Street, the Victorian crime drama starring Matthew Macfadyen and Jerome Flynn which it resurrected when it was axed after two series by the BBC last year.
Unlike Netflix, which made a virtue out of making all of the episodes of House of Cards and its hit women’s prison drama Orange is the New Black available to watch immediately, Ripper Street will be released one episode at a time, at 9pm on Fridays, after a launch double header on 14 November.
It will climax on Boxing Day when (Amazon hopes) lots of people will have worked out how to work the tablets they have been given for Christmas. “Certainly customers do enjoy the binge viewing aspect but I don’t think it is the be all and end all,” said Bird.
Neither Amazon nor Netflix release viewing figures but Amazon is widely perceived to be playing catchup, a study this year in the US suggesting its streaming video figures fall some way short of Netflix.
For now, video on demand also remains dwarfed by mainstream TV, with linear TV channels accounting for 75% of all video (an average of five hours a day) consumed by people in the UK in 2013, according to commercial TV marketing body Thinkbox.
Will Gould, executive producer of Ripper Street and head of drama at its producer, Tiger Aspect, said making the show for Amazon had freed up the creative process. The BBC, which remains a funding partner, will screen the series next year.
“Technically it’s quite freeing because you can cut it to any length you like. You don’t have the 10 o’clock news breathing down your neck and we have one episode which is 80 minutes, feature length,” said Gould. “We’re also not tied down to BBC compliance in terms of gore or sex, but that’s not a road we have travelled down in a big way.”
The new series would be “slightly more serialised”, said Gould. “It’s still an episodic crime show but it will tell one big story with more of an arc across the eight episodes.
“Being with Amazon we felt that we had the opportunity to push that a bit further. You don’t have to reintroduce the audience to it because all the previous episodes are available to watch [on Amazon]. It makes you a bit braver.”
