Laverne Cox in Amazon’s Norman Lear Sitcom

Amazon‘s Clean Slate is more of a fantasy of societal understanding than an issue-oriented comedy, very rarely producing laughs but very frequently generating reasonably earned warm-fuzzies.

Even after watching the full eight-episode first season, it’s unclear if this is the safest, softest comedy it would be possible to make about a topic still pushing the edge of the cultural envelope, or if the edgiest thing possible is actually to take a topic that many people would expect to be a minefield and treat it in a safe and soft way.

One of the last shows to feature the late, great Norman Lear as a credited executive producer, Clean Slate doesn’t do what the best of Lear’s ’70s output did — acknowledging, confronting and diffusing oppositional perspectives so thoroughly that the holders of each of those opinions felt seen. That said, it would be reasonable, in a series about the rekindled relationship between a father and his long-absent trans daughter, to say that the side that not focused on love and acceptance isn’t even worthy of consideration.

George Wallace plays Harry Slate, owner of the Slate Family Car Wash in Mobile, Alabama. After 23 years of estrangement, Harry is eager to welcome back the child he thought was his sad, insecure son. Instead, he greets confident, generally happy Desiree (Laverne Cox), who has left behind a career in the New York City art world after financing for the gallery she was launching fell through.

Harry is taken aback for maybe 30 seconds, accidentally misgenders his daughter one or twice. But then he’s fairly accepting, with the joke/twist being that he’s much more outraged to learn that Desiree is vegetarian. Archie Bunker, he is not. It takes even less time for Harry’s ex-con employee, Mack (Jay Wilkison), and Mack’s precocious tween daughter, Opal (Norah Murphy), to love Desiree unconditionally. Other characters, including local church choir director Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu) and Louis’ mother, Ella (Telma Hopkins), are instantly on-board.

In the most recent U.S. presidential election, 65 percent of Alabama residents voted for a candidate who aggressively stoked transphobia as a pillar of his campaign. Even if you acknowledge that that percentage doesn’t represent the Black vote, it’s still not a state normally recognized for its support of LGBTQ+ rights. 

The Alabama of Clean Slate, however, is one in which exactly one person, a bigoted pastor, requires any education at all about the newest member of the community. This may be the most progressive approach that creators Cox, Wallace and Dan Ewen could have taken. The conventional version of this story could had Desiree constantly needing to teach people Very Important Trans Lessons. Here, the people who need to have their attitudes reexamined are the coastal elites in the audience who assume Alabama would be a haven for bigotry, and shame on us for that ignorance. 

But when Clean Slate really does try to tackle larger issues — as in an Election Day episode featuring hostile Trumpian poll monitors and anti-democratic voter restrictions — the transition from fantasy to realism and then back to fantasy isn’t convincing.

More persuasive is the framing of Desiree’s arc so it’s related not to other people accepting her, but to the anxiety she has experienced on her life’s journey. This often left me feeling like the best version of this narrative might have been an hourlong WB-style tonal hybrid in the Gilmore Girls vein, instead of a single-camera comedy with the broad broad punchlines of a multicam, only without the approval of audience laughter. The writing staff, which includes Shadi Petosky (Danger & Eggs), comes from a variety of backgrounds, so it isn’t always clear why this was the chosen format, even if it’s the one in which Lear made his name.

Filmed largely in Georgia, Clean Slate gains nothing at all from its location shooting. At its very best, it’s visually bland. More frequently, it has negative production values, though the Spanish moss in the trees looks authentic. Given the number of solid pros behind the camera — Nisha Gantra directed the pilot, with Matthew A. Cherry and Randall Keenan Winston helming other chapters — the show could have looked less blatantly cheap.

But Cox and Wallace are a very good central pairing. Cox is funny, though I preferred the way she plays dramatic beats and Desiree’s slow-burn romance with Wilkison’s Mack to the times when she hits punchlines and expects an audience cheer that isn’t there. A Desiree/Mack romance fits into the theme of matter-of-fact visibility as well, with Desiree asking Mack once if he’s ever dated a trans woman — one of only two or three times anybody says “trans” in the series — to which he replies, “Not yet.” It’s never addressed again.

In contrast, venerable standup legend Wallace is completely at ease with punchlines that sound like they could have been lifted straight from his various social media feeds. His more dramatic material comes with insufficient frequency, but it’s delivered solidly.

In lieu of conflict, the series leans into affection for its characters. Some of the most emotional moments come from Hopkins, as a character whose empathy is meant to defy Southern church lady stereotypes, while I laughed more at Murphy’s chipper-yet-neurotic Opal than anybody else. 

Because of this pervasive amiability, Clean Slate rarely has any stakes, be they episodic or season-long. Plotlines hang on hastily forgotten health scares, Harry’s rivalry with his inconsistently written neighbor Miguel (Phillip Garcia) or Louis’ own struggles with coming out of the closet. 

The finale gives the impression of raising those stakes on several fronts, but given Amazon’s general disinterest in shows originally created for the now-defunct Freevee, it’s hard to have any faith that even a one this likable and non-confrontationally well-meaning will get renewed. It’s a pity. Clean Slate, Sprung, Primo, The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh and High School should be the foundation for TV’s most distinctive half-hour brand, rather than afterthoughts in the Bezos empire.