‘Transparent’ Renewed for Season 5

Amazon has renewed Transparent for a fifth season, ahead of its fourth-season premiere, it was announced Thursday.

The fourth season of Jill Soloway’s Emmy-winning series will release its 10 episodes on Friday, Sept. 22.

The fifth season will begin production next year and is expected to premiere later in 2018. The entire Pfefferman family is expected to be back for the fifth season, including Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Gaby Hoffman, Jay Duplass and Amy Landecker.

Soloway and Andrea Sperling will continue as executive producers.

“Over the past few seasons the Pfeffermans have gone across the world, back in time and made many, many trips to the deli,” Amazon Studios’ head of comedy, drama and VR, Joe Lewis, said in a statement. “We’re so excited to see what magic Jill and the incredible team bring to this always groundbreaking series in season five.”

Soloway added: “We are extremely grateful to Amazon Studios for their continued trust and support and to our audience for their warm embrace of the Pfeffermans. We look forward to another season of comedy and drama, love and weirdness, God and sex — in the service of community and in pursuit of peace, joy, freedom and human rights for all.”

Transparent has won two Golden Globes, including one for Tambor in his starring role as Maura Pfefferman; eight Emmys; a Screen Actors Guild award for Tambor; and DGA and PGA awards.

The half-hour series stars Tambor as the patriarch of the Pfefferman family, who comes out as transgender and begins to live life as Maura. Light plays Maura’s ex-wife Shelly with the pair’s children played by Hoffmann, Landecker and Duplass.

The groundbreaking series has blazed a path for LGBTQ representation on TV, and Soloway has described the upcoming season as “political” and one that will be “crossing borders and boundaries.” In the fourth season (trailer above), Maura heads to Israel and makes a startling family discovery, prompting the rest of the Pfefferman clan — Ali (Hoffmann), Sarah (Landecker), Josh (Duplass), and Shelly — to join her in the Holy Land.

“One of the interesting things about playing Maura is that she is not a thirty-something. She is a 70-year-old and life is going tick-tock, tick-tock and she’s searching for home base,” Tambor recently told The Hollywood Reporter of the Emmy-winning role he is once again nominated for this year. “But it keeps her young in her life. She is, in a way, a teenager, I think. I have not talked about this and no one has talked to me about that, but I see her as someone who is just learning stuff. And that’s the joy. So you have the old part of her, which is in years, and then you have this young, new spirit that is just trying to find home base and where the love is. It’s a much-used word but it’s a perfect word: She’s trying to find her authenticity.”

He teased that Maura gets “two hits” this season: “She gets to find something out about her family and she gets to find out where she can find love. She is looking and she’s adamant.”

The renewal makes Transparent Amazon’s longest-running series and falls in line with Tambor’s hope for the future.

“I’m going to go out playing Maura,” he said. “There’s no end of stories, every day is a different story. You open the New York Times and you get another story. I hope it goes on forever. I’ve made it known to Amazon and to anybody who will listen!”

Jackie Strause contributed to this story.