I’m back at “Dear Television” proselytizing Amazon’s terrific new series, Transparent and creator Jill Soloway’s next-level revisions of the ensemble family dramedy form:

“As the camera spins and cuts around the large table, the siblings build what is recognizable as the shorthand of familial intimacy. They finish each others’ sentences, they don’t respect each others’ physical space, they tease, they coddle. But as the speed of the cuts and pans increase and the siblings’ faces become slashed with barbecue sauce like the sets of a samurai film, this intimacy begins to feel barbaric, bullying even. This is the ensemble as perpetual motion machine, the family as out-of-control whirligig.”

“That’s Not the Way it Feels: Transparent’s Ensemble”