April 11 (UPI) — “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway says Jeffrey Tambor’s character will indeed be killed off on the show.
The 53-year-old writer and director confirmed the death in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published Thursday, prior to the Amazon series’ musical finale.
Tambor, who plays Maura Pfefferman, was fired from “Transparent” in February 2018 following allegations of sexual misconduct. Soloway said the finale will begin with Maura’s death and follow the Pfefferman family (Judith Light, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass and Gaby Hoffmann) as they grapple with her passing.
“We were all mourning in many ways, and we all had to process together,” Soloway said of the decision to kill off Maura. “It was important [for the show] to go through all those stages. The show has always been a reflection of who we were and we were mourning our own narrative.”
“People say when they’re making musical that there are moments when the characters have to sing because they can’t put something into words,” she added. “I think it’s the same thing with what our show went through, we felt like we needed a different way of looking at the family. And we did it through song.”
“Transparent” shared a first look at Light as Maura’s ex-wife, Shelly Pfefferman, with USA Today. The finale, titled “The Transparent Musicale Finale,” will be released on Amazon sometime in the fall.
Soloway and her sister, Faith Soloway, wrote the music and lyrics for the episode.
“It felt like a confluence of all these things, to go on a journey of all the show’s success as well as the pain of last year losing Jeffrey … and to have been able to turn toward my sister, Faith, and her music, to create a musical,” Soloway said.
“We’re ending it in such a way that it feels more like a transition than an ending,” Faith, a writer on the show, added. “It feels like a different animal. You try not to do the carbon copy of what you’re done when you lose a core person. You take the magic of what you have and rebuild.”
“Transparent” debuted on Amazon in February 2014. The series, which follows Maura’s journey as a transgender woman, completed its fourth season in September 2017.
