Review: ‘Clean Slate’ is a sweet, new old-fashioned family comedy

Given the state of things, it feels good to have a trans person playing a trans character in a family comedy on our most consumed medium. Whatever else you can say about television, it does tend to keep moving, however fitfully, into the light.

“Clean Slate,” streaming from Prime Video beginning Thursday, stars Laverne Cox as Desiree Slate, returning from New York to Mobile, Ala., after 23 silent years to anxiously reunite with her father, Harry, played by George Wallace. When last they met, Desiree was Desmond.

According to Wallace, he had approached the late Norman Lear, an executive producer on “Clean Slate,” about the possibility of rebooting “Sanford and Son,” and in the fullness of time it brought forth this series, which is similar mainly in that it concerns a cantankerous oldster living in close quarters with his differently tempered offspring and is set (mostly) among Black people in a Black neighborhood.

Television

Laverne Cox and George Wallace offer a loving vision of trans families in ‘Clean Slate’

The actors spoke about their new Prime Video comedy series that features Cox as a transgender woman returning home to Alabama to live with her father, played by Wallace.

Feb. 5, 2025

The first episode opens with a quote from Lear — “The laughter I’ve enjoyed most is laughter that has brought numbers of us together” — and the show is certainly sweet, and occasionally corny, and sometimes a little clunky, as if we’re watching characters in a play put on a play; they read as “characters,” assembled to a purpose, arranged in a plan. So there is a neighbor for Harry to argue with (Phillip Garcia as Miguel); ex-con Mack (Jay Wilkison), who works for him at his car wash and has a precocious grade-school daughter, Opal (Norah Murphy), planning to run the world, or at least something large and important; a friend for Desiree, Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu), who leads the church choir and imagines nobody knows he’s gay; and Louis’ mother, Ella (Telma Hopkins), the show’s most settled person.

George Wallace co-stars as Henry, Desiree’s father, in “Clean Slate.”

(Prime Video)

As to the trans theme, “Clean Slate” takes its foot off that pedal fairly quickly, and settles into its groove as a generation-gap, culture-clash comedy about a father who likes his bad habits and a daughter who wants to improve him, set within a larger comedy of Southern manners. (Cox is from Mobile, Wallace is from Atlanta, and their co-creator Dan Ewen is from Athens, Ga.) After a very brief initial shock, there is nary a moment when Harry doesn’t accept Desiree for who she is, though it will take him a short while to remember to call her Desiree, and he will occasionally use an improper pronoun; money goes in a “pronoun jar” when he does.

In any case, these slips aren’t presented as a moral failing. If anything, it’s Desiree who comes off, at least to start, as the more judgmental person, arriving armed with matcha, mugwort and an agenda from her therapist — to break a pattern of unavailable men in her romantic life by confronting “the first emotionally unavailable man in my life.” (“Who the hell is he?” cries Harry, missing a point. “Does he live around here? Do we need to go pay him a visit?”) Among the townsfolk, only the preacher has a problem with Desiree. Most everyone else is supportive, even celebratory; the community shows up. And Mack wants to date her.

Sitcom situations abound: Harry teaching Desiree how to drive. Desiree selling Harry’s things at a yard sale, much to his displeasure. There’s a trip to an amusement park to adjust Opal’s work-life balance, and a trip to a dance club for Desiree and Louis. Desiree wants to be re-baptized as Desiree — but, oh, that preacher. An episode set on voting day is strange to watch, given the world we’re living in. “Today is Nov. 7, not Jan. 6,” Harry says to Miguel, in line behind him. “I’m not a traitor,” Miguel protests. “I’m a libertarian.”) But the theme is more disorganization than democracy. Characters quarrel in order to reconcile.

I can’t make any great claims for the show as anything more than a pretty decent newfangled old-fashioned comedy, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Both Wallace and Cox are imposing people; they match well. He’s clearly having fun in his not-Redd Foxx role; she’s good sassy, sultry, but also sensitive company. And though I am 100% supportive of the fight to bring production back to Hollywood, the Southern locations (the series filmed near Savannah, Ga., only 496 miles from Mobile) do properly support the storytelling.