Clean Slate Goes All in on Feel-Good

Laverne Cox’s sitcom protagonist doesn’t operate in our world. Honestly, good for her. Photo: Prime Video

For decades in American television, the entire point of a Norman Lear sitcom was friction. Shows like The Jeffersons or All in the Family could reflect important conversations happening in America by depicting multiple points of view and allowing characters with different perspectives to talk them out. That’s how Archie Bunker becomes a flashpoint figure for an entire American conservative movement; it’s how shows like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Maude become groundbreaking texts, kicking off vociferous arguments about how morality, prejudice, media, and political conflict intersect for the average American TV viewer.

The premise of Prime’s new Norman Lear–produced sitcom Clean Slate is classic Lear, immediately recognizable and familiar (the series wrapped filming about six months before Lear’s December 2023 death). Desiree, played by Laverne Cox, has returned home to Mobile, Alabama, after a bad breakup, hoping to reunite with her estranged father, Harry (George Wallace). All the building-block Lear-style pieces are there. Generational divide. Shifting norms of cultural acceptance and social visibility. Fear of change. Fear of rejection. A different shape of contemporary family. Except even from the first episode, the most striking thing about Clean Slate is how intensely it is not any of those things. Time and again, there are opportunities for scenes where Desiree has to fight to stand up for herself, or deal with prejudice from her family or neighbors. Almost every time, Clean Slate chooses swift and even nonchalant acceptance.

When Desiree first shows up at Harry’s door, he doesn’t even recognize her (“Hi, miss fancy lady!” he greets her). She has to tell him that she’s trans and now going by a different name. Sure, he’s initially surprised, even dazed, and he does have some questions. But there’s never a moment when he grows cold or seems uneasy. Within moments he’s invited Desiree to stay with him even though she has a place to crash with a friend. The big sitcom-y moment of shock, the thing Harry really struggles with, is Desiree announcing she’s vegetarian. And even before she and Harry talk it out, Clean Slate forestalls any possibility that this might be a show about a parent who doesn’t accept their child. Desiree shows up, Harry opens the door, he’s not sure what to say, and then the opening credits kick in, full of scenes from future episodes where they smile at each other lovingly and Desiree pats his knee with fond affection.

This continues throughout the series. Desiree is warmly accepted by the lovely older ladies in the church choir. She develops cute romantic tension with Mack (Jay Wilkinson), a man who works at Harry’s car wash and happens to be a single dad to the show’s obligatory precocious moppet character, Opal (Norah Murphy). Desiree’s close friend Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu) is gay and has not come out of the closet, even though his mom makes clear to everyone else that she already knows, is happy for him, and is trying to wait patiently until he’s ready. Desiree encounters bigotry and rejection from one significant voice in her community, the local pastor, who makes it clear she’s not welcome and refuses to change her baptismal certificate to her new name. But this one close-minded person is met with instant and intense pushback from everyone else in the series, all of whom are thrilled to go to bat for Desiree to support her in any way she can think to ask.

Absent the messy living-room conversations about compassion and bias that mark so many Lear sitcoms, Clean Slate becomes a little closer to a Bill Lawrence series, a single-cam comedy where everyone loves each other and all the tension comes from small, surmountable conflicts like Harry needing to eat healthier or Opal learning how to get along with kids her own age. One episode is set in an interminably long line to vote at a local polling station on Election Day. Rather than tackle voter suppression head-on, the episode is about the privilege and importance of voting, but with very little discussion of why or what’s at stake for someone like Desiree. It’s all perfectly nice, but at times the series veers so far from conflict that its characters feel thin and underdeveloped.

Clean Slate has gone all in on feel-good, and the effect on the series as a whole is that it’s both happier and emptier as a result. The effect of that choice for Desiree, though, is that she’s living in an America that does not look much like the America of 2025, where a slew of anti-trans rhetoric over the last several years has culminated in state-sanctioned erasure of trans people from governmental research and records and a list of executive orders demanding, among other things, that hospitals stop providing necessary care to trans youth. Desiree has no conversations about access to hormones. Her relationship with her father is so strong that at the end of the season, Harry offers her a beautiful assurance that he does love her and does want her … and the scene falls a little flat, because the show has been so clear all along that Harry’s thrilled to have Desiree back in his life. She lives in a country that does not currently exist.

Honestly, good for her.

In an earlier paradigm of TV programming, when there were only three channels and TV shows had dozens of episodes a season, it’s likely Clean Slate would have followed the older Lear model. Harry would’ve been grumpy and rude, making brusque jokes about inane gender stereotypes and asking direct, invasive questions about anatomy. Desiree would’ve been forced into a defensive posture, pleading for empathy and regularly arguing for her own right to exist. And in that earlier TV era, a show like Clean Slate could’ve opened some viewers’ eyes. For many people, this alternate Harry’s self-evident prejudice would’ve made him appear cruel, self-absorbed, and foolish, and Desiree’s inevitable monologues about how trans people have always existed might have changed some minds. That kind of show, in that TV landscape, with seasons long enough to include lots of lighter episodes and a broader mix of tone and topics, could have worked.

In 2025, though, Clean Slate is a streaming show on Amazon Prime, a platform not known for its sitcoms and which has done very little to promote this show’s existence. Although Prime was once on the vanguard of trans television representation with Transparent, it has since developed a much more established audience for big, muscular genre shows like The Boys, The Terminal List, and Jack Ryan. And there are many, many more than three channels now (we don’t even call them that anymore). An audience member who stumbles across Clean Slate and finds themselves turned off by the premise of the show can leave one furious zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes then merrily turn to a new season of Reacher. There’s no captive audience to try to persuade because audiences are no longer captive.

With more time, Clean Slate could become a richer and more confident comedy. But it may not get that time; Prime’s Freevee shows like Primo and High School certainly didn’t, and now Freevee no longer exists. So why shouldn’t Clean Slate use whatever runway it has to be an improbable love fest? Why not veer toward aspirational depictions of a close-knit community with stories about a woman who discovers her dad loves her and has always loved her? Why not turn Harry’s Car Wash into a place of secular spiritual rebirth, and let Desiree kiss hot people, and have a sweet show set in a town where things are generally great? It’s good to feel good for a little while, and Clean Slate can at least do that.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated production timing for Clean Slate.