‘Clean Slate’ Review: A Parting Gift From Norman Lear

Norman Lear never retired. In the decade leading up to his death at age 101, in 2023, the legendary creator of All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, and too many other classic sitcoms to name teamed up with a younger, noticeably less pale and male, generation of TV talent to update some of his best-known works. In 2017, he collaborated with Gloria Calderón Kellett on a Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time, this time spotlighting a Cuban American single mom and her family. Lear’s Good Times reappeared last year, also on Netflix, as an animated series, with a team of executive producers including Lear, Steph Curry, and showrunner Ranada Shepard. He spent the final weeks of his life working on a revival of his most offbeat prime-time project, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, starring Schitt’s Creek alum Emily Hampshire. 

Unlike those shows, Clean Slate, an Amazon comedy created by Dan Ewen, Laverne Cox, and George Wallace that includes Lear among its executive producers, is an original story. But it’s also an unmistakable product of his sensibility. An old-school, hugging-and-learning sitcom despite its single-camera style, it even opens with a quote from the great man: “The laughter that I’ve enjoyed most is laughter that has brought numbers of us together.” Lear believed that a society capable of joking about its problems and prejudices was a society capable of overcoming them. Clean Slate, a mixed bag of lovable characters and stale one-liners, captures the appeal of that optimism but suffers from its naïveté in an era very different from the 1970s.

At the center of the show is a prototypical crotchety yet goodhearted Lear patriarch, Wallace’s Harry Slate. Harry has lived for decades in the small Alabama town where he owns a car wash, where his wife died young, and where his son Desmond fled without looking back for 17 years. When Harry’s child finally shows up on his doorstep, she is Desiree (Cox)—a trans woman who is broke, defeated, and out of options after ending a relationship and losing her New York gallery. She expects the worst from her churchgoing dad, a man so stuck in the past, his house is a museum of Desiree’s mother. And the news of her transition certainly comes as a shock to him. “I thought you had a son,” says a neighbor who witnesses the reunion. Harry: “So did I.”

But Harry is, despite being a fixture in his community, lonely. Being a basically kind person, he also loves Desiree—a fact that makes their long estrangement a bit hard to believe—even if he doesn’t immediately understand her or know how to be an ally. (She makes him put money in a jar every time he slips and misgenders her.) With some help from the more forward-thinking people around him, though, Harry learns how to be the father his adult daughter needs. These sweet supporting characters include car-wash worker Mack (Jay Wilkison), an ex-con single dad rebuilding his life with 11-year-old Opal (Norah Murphy), an intense aspiring businesswoman; Desiree’s childhood friend Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu), a closeted church choir director; and Louis’ mom, Ella (Telma Hopkins), with whom Harry has a flirtatiously combative rapport.

This team of writers struggles, perhaps understandably amid escalating attacks on the trans community, to take the risks that made Lear’s best work not just important, but also hilarious. So gentle is the humor of Clean Slate that it seems more likely to generate clapter than belly laughs. Some of the quips belong in the Dad Joke Hall of Shame: “One man’s bullsh-t is another man’s fertilizer.” “Where there’s a will, there’s a gay.” An episode set on Election Day takes long lines outside poll sites as a given but sidesteps candidates, parties, and issues that would be bound to affect the diverse cast of characters. The funniest scene—in which a voter taunting “libtards” gets too close to a barbecue grill and sets his American-flag cape on fire—is also the scene that makes the most explicit reference to our current state of toxic partisanship.

Clean Slate’s best moments come not when it’s openly preaching or making overwritten jokes, but when it’s developing its characters and community. Desiree’s disappointment about the collapse of her big life in the big city simmers for most of the season, her residual art-world snobbery threatening to poison a nascent romance with Mack, until she comes to a sudden, moving realization: “I don’t have anything left! I’m just a sad bitch!” Another highlight is the show’s complicated yet respectful engagement with the church, an institution around which Harry, Louis, and Ella have built their lives—and one to which Desiree longs to return—but whose leaders can fail to show their most loyal congregants the compassion they deserve.

The tone of the series is, more than anything else, comforting, at a time when trans people and their allies could certainly use some moral affirmation—not to mention emotional validation. As saccharine as it can be, Clean Slate is a useful reminder that a person is not an ideology; that plenty of conservative or religious or out-of-touch parents never stop loving their LGBTQ children; and that people who choose hate instead should, as David Lynch famously put it, “fix their hearts or die.” What it doesn’t do, with its humor or its storylines, is situate Harry and Desiree in an authentic world. Their hometown is, rather, an alternate universe where Lear’s vision of American progress prevails—where people talk things out, jokes repair societal schisms, love wins, and bigots face consequences. A nice place to visit, but one you don’t have to be a sad bitch to fear we’ll never actually inhabit.