Clean Slate Review – Laver Cox’s comedy is so darn lovable that it is impossible to resist | Television

S.Oosthum work can be difficult to assess, but pure slate, executive produced by the late large TV icon Norman Lear, exudes his signature heat and intelligence. The creator of American TV comedies that came to define the 70s, including everyone in the family, good times and Jefferson’s, had in the last decade returned to our living rooms. He performed the feisty feminist remake of his sitcom one day at a time, bringing the legendary Rita Moreno back to our screens and had signed up to clean the slate at the time he died. Lear’s signatures of complicated family relationships, progressive politics and infinite empathy are everywhere in his last project, which is a testimony to his ability to make TV that was fun, fun and radical.

Unlike many of his previous shows, Clean Slate is a multicamera sitcom without a laughter; It follows Desiree Slate (Orange is the new Black’s Break-Out star Lave Cox), a glamorous art galleryist who finds himself single, bread and forced to leave New York to return to his childhood home in Alabama. She moves in with her canticing father Harry Slate (Standup legend George Wallace), who is surprised to hear his alienated son has been transferred even though she points out, “I’ve always been wanted.”

The reunited couple tried to repair their relationship and Harry is surprised, but immediately open to this new dynamic. Although he often slides up when it comes to pronoun and understands Desiree’s passion for art, he is never hateful. Harry willingly puts five dollars in a jar every time he accidentally abuses his offspring, and is in fact in the light of anyone who questions her transition. The couple has a charming chemistry, with Cox Landing Pithy Zingers about Beyoncé, while Wallace creates a perfect balance between joviality and cuts people down to the size of Akerbian one-liners. Often on the receiving end of his sharp tongue is his colleague on car wash, reformed con mack (Jay Wilkison); Harry reminds him that his recent imprisonment is the only interesting thing about him. Mack is accompanied, on her part, regularly by the sitcom staunches of a prominent teenage daughter who quickly binds with Desiree after considering what is pronounced she prefers. Also true to classic sitcom form there is a simmering will-de-won’t-they between Desiree and Mack.

As sweet and cozy as this show often is, it stops shortly after Hallmark level Schmaltz. Alabama “doesn’t always try to roll with” his queer inhabitants, as Harry does: The Great Pastor Hughes (Keith Arthur The ball) meets Desiree’s and her queer friend Louis (DK Uzoukwu) identities with hostility. But Cox is such an enchanting presence, it is quite convincing that almost everyone else she meets is charmed by her. The show does not treat Desiree or her transness as a curiosity or a punchline, instead annoying gentle fun on her art world pretentiousness and dependence on therapy speech and astrology.

Cox and Wallace together with Dan Ewen are credited as creators of the show, and Sitcom plays for their specific strengths; Their grades are very much in line with their public personae by Sassy Glamazon and Funny Truth Teller respectively. But true to Lear’s earlier work is this comedy-Antics, which is based on a social conscience, and sometimes its delivery is powerful. In its weakest moments this includes clumsy dialogue such as: “The best thing you can do is go where you are wanted and get what you want.”

Even when it lacks subtlety, the characters and history of the show are just so darn that it is impossible to resist its cozy delights. The combination of comfort with low effort and slightly seen representation feels at the same time an old-school joy and a refreshing piece of progress. In a time when queer identity is increasingly politicized and threatened, Clean Slate is a welcome antidote: a charming story that allows Cox to show her innate magnetism. Her work as an activist and as an actor has been at the forefront of transre representation, and her leading a sitcom on Prime Video Executive produced by one of the Greats is a testimony to the cultural cachet she has built over the past two decades. Although Norman Lear died by the end of 2023 in the great old age of 101, before Desiree and Harry’s Antics were filmed, watching these eight episodes that you couldn’t feel he would be proud of the slate clan and his continued legacy.