There’s an old school really feel to Prime Video’s latest comedy, “Clean Slate.” Its title, which harkens again to community sitcoms of yesteryear and healthful themes of a household rising and studying collectively, really feel straight out of a Norman Lear manufacturing. And that’s by design.
Humorist George Wallace, who performs automobile wash proprietor Harry Slate, first imagined this affable father/daughter sequence as a riff on a traditional Black sitcom.
“I went to Norman Lear, who I’d known since the ’90s, and I said, ‘You rebooting everything else! Let’s reboot ‘Sanford and Son,’ ” he remembers over Zoom, sitting subsequent to his “Clean Slate” co-star, Laverne Cox.
“I basically just wanted to hear [Wallace hums the sitcom’s iconic Quincy Jones theme song] because that makes you feel good already, right?” he provides. “But [Lear] said, ‘That’s the craziest idea I ever heard. Get out of here, come back with a twist.’ ”
The twist that Wallace, co-creator Dan Ewen and Cox developed, feels, regardless of its conventional trappings, tailored for 2025. The eight-episode sequence premiering Thursday was amongst Lear’s ultimate tasks earlier than his dying in 2023; the legendary TV writer-producer was identified for boundary-pushing, socially related reveals and “Clean Slate” falls in that ethos. Wallace’s Harry is Sanford-like, a cantankerous man whose life is upended when cool-headed Desiree (Cox) reveals up at his doorstep. Confronted with a transgender daughter he hasn’t spoken to in a long time and who’d left Cell, Ala., for New York Metropolis, Harry has to work anew to be the daddy she’s all the time wanted.
Partly autobiographical — Cox herself grew up in Cell — “Clean Slate” imagines a world the place a curmudgeon like Harry would have simply as onerous a time with Desiree’s vegetarian proclivities as along with her gender identification. As a operating gag in a single episode, he’s referred to as so as to add money to the “Pronoun Jar” every time he misgenders or deadnames his daughter.
“Clean Slate” is partly autobiographical. Laverne Cox, like her character Desiree, grew up in Cell, Ala.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Occasions)
No matter bigotry is portrayed right here — like when the native pastor refuses to hug Desiree the way in which he does all different church-going women — is defanged by the loving group that surrounds the Slates. That might be what’s most radical in regards to the present.
Desiree, who’s usually pushed by the teachings she’s realized in remedy (“Be present, curious and nonjudgmental,” she reminds herself on the bus on the way in which to Alabama), is allowed to merely wrestle with the ups and downs of being a human being. Her tiffs with Harry are much less about her transition and extra in regards to the type of variations a father and daughter would have after they’ve been estranged for many years.
“What I find really interesting is that, in real life when I’m with my mother, sometimes she’ll say something and I’ll feel 11 years old again,” Cox shares. “And I felt that as Desiree. I felt like there were certain moments where George would say something or some dynamic would come up, and I would feel like a little kid. I think that’s a great thing for people to see and experience.”
Laverne Cox and George Wallace in a scene from Prime Video’s “Clean Slate.”
(Courtesy of Prime)
Desiree’s want to reconnect along with her father doesn’t ignore the damage and trauma she skilled as a baby. The present affords a imaginative and prescient of trans childhood that earnestly asks not for mere tolerance or acceptance however for affirmation. For Cox, who broke floor when she turned the primary overtly trans performer to earn an Emmy nomination for “Orange Is the New Black,” there’s an urgency to such a plea. A bit greater than a decade since she was featured on the quilt of Time journal for an article titled “The Transgender Tipping Point,” Cox has seen firsthand how rhetoric in regards to the trans group has shifted.
“At the time, journalists wanted to talk to trans people,” Cox says. “They were like, ‘Let’s bring a trans person to talk about this.’ Then there was a period when the right wing got a really good strategy together. They were, like, ‘We’re gonna focus on sports. That’ll be the gateway into taking away all trans people’s rights.’ And it worked out very well for them. Then we stopped seeing them talk with trans people, and they were just talking about us and just making up all kinds of insane things. We were just cut out of the conversation and deeply dehumanized.”
“Clean Slate” is an opportunity to supply a counter narrative. It imagines a world not with out transphobia however with sufficient like to go round that such discrimination doesn’t drown out Desiree’s day-to-day existence, not to mention her dignity. It’s as didactic as it’s aspirational — particularly at a time when govt orders from President Trump proceed to focus on and erase trans lives.
Subplots within the present’s first few episodes heart on mundane situations, like profession day on the native college and soccer video games throughout yard gross sales. Desiree spends her days flirting with hunky automobile wash worker Mack (Jay Wilkison) whereas mentoring his precocious younger daughter Opal (Norah Murphy). She eggs on her closeted BFF Louis (D.Okay. Uzoukwu) to get on Grindr and sidles as much as his church-going mom Ella (Telma Hopkins). All of the whereas, Desiree places her years of remedy to work as she and Harry return to one another’s lives.
“I felt like there were certain moments where George would say something or some dynamic would come up, and I would feel like a little kid. I think that’s a great thing for people to see and experience,” says Laverne Cox about working along with her co-star George Wallace.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Occasions)
On and offscreen, Wallace and Cox make for a hilarious odd couple; she a imaginative and prescient in restraint (as we speak in a killer bob and classic Mugler), he an explosion of spontaneity (in a plain leather-based jacket and cap). Cox, like Desiree, is large on therapyspeak. She hopes this present will help bridge variations, open audiences to see the humanity in each other and have it function a approach to battle the present rhetoric that’s tearing folks aside.
“There’s something about the internet and this culture right now where dehumanization is just rampant,” Cox says. “Not just with trans people — with everyone. We disagree politically and we just say dehumanizing things. And, for me, that’s just the worst thing in the world. Because when you dehumanize people, then you can commit violence against them. You can take away their rights.”
For Wallace, it’s all simply as easy. Whilst he sits again in awe listening to his youthful co-star, he approaches his solutions along with his requisite no-nonsense humor.
“I’m a horse of a different color,” he says. “I’ve always been ahead of my time. I grew up loving people, respecting everybody. I’m a child of the ’70s and ’80s. I learned to love people in New York City. It’s really who I am. I don’t care who you are, what you are, where you’re coming from, or where you’re going. If you’re a nice person, I’m gonna love you. And you’re gonna love me, too. I’m gonna make you love me if you don’t. And that’s who Harry is.”
“I’ve always been ahead of my time. I grew up loving people, respecting everybody. I’m a child of the ’70s and ’80s. I learned to love people in New York City. It’s really who I am,” says comic George Wallace.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Occasions)
Such completely different however complementary approaches are mirrored in “Clean Slate” and showcase how the 2 tackled the comedic sensibility of the present.
“I may have done comedy before, but not with a legend like this,” Cox says, remembering how she first noticed Wallace on “The Tonight Show” within the ’80s.
Furthermore, given how near residence the premise of the present is for Cox, she labored along with her performing coach to raised harness the way in which a number of the dialogue and subplots — to not point out the set on which they shot — triggered her personal previous trauma.
“It was very intimidating finding my comedic voice while being the kind of actress who wants to be grounded in the character’s unfulfilled needs and all that stuff,” she says.
Wallace, who’s had an extended profession as a slapstick comedian, is lastly a number one man on tv in his 70s. And it’s for a task that’s ready-made for his affable and playfully abrasive humorousness.
“Meanwhile, I’m an idiot,” Wallace says with a chuckle. “She was all of these things, studied and went to college and learned how to act and all of that stuff. I just come out and go ‘What the hell you doing?!’ But this chemistry is just awesome.”
Onscreen, that tug-and-pull performs out like a contemporary queer riff on “Sanford and Son.”
“I’m learning who she is,” Wallace says about Cox and Desiree alike, wistfully summing up what “Clean Slate” aspires to be. “I’m learning a lot. And that’s what I think the show is really about. Me being educated in America about how to live, how to love and how to laugh.”
