There’s an old-fashioned feel to Prime Video’s newest comedy, “Clean Slate.” Its title, which harkens back to network sitcoms of yesteryear and wholesome themes of a family growing and learning together, feel straight out of a Norman Lear production. And that’s by design.
Stand-up comedian George Wallace, who plays car wash owner Harry Slate, first imagined this affable father/daughter series as a riff on a classic Black sitcom.
“I went to Norman Lear, who I’d known since the ’90s, and I said, ‘You rebooting everything else! Let’s reboot ‘Sanford and Son,’ ” he recalls over Zoom, sitting next to his “Clean Slate” co-star, Laverne Cox.
“I basically just wanted to hear [Wallace hums the sitcom’s iconic Quincy Jones theme song] because that makes you feel good already, right?” he adds. “But [Lear] said, ‘That’s the craziest idea I ever heard. Get out of here, come back with a twist.’ ”
The twist that Wallace, co-creator Dan Ewen and Cox developed, feels, despite its traditional trappings, tailor-made for 2025. The eight-episode series premiering Thursday was among Lear’s final projects before his death in 2023; the legendary TV writer-producer was known for boundary-pushing, socially relevant shows and “Clean Slate” falls in that ethos. Wallace’s Harry is Sanford-like, a cantankerous guy whose life is upended when cool-headed Desiree (Cox) shows up at his doorstep. Faced with a transgender daughter he hasn’t spoken to in decades and who’d left Mobile, Ala., for New York City, Harry has to work anew to be the father she’s always needed.
Partly autobiographical — Cox herself grew up in Mobile — “Clean Slate” imagines a world where a curmudgeon like Harry would have just as hard a time with Desiree’s vegetarian proclivities as with her gender identity. As a running gag in one episode, he’s called to add cash to the “Pronoun Jar” whenever he misgenders or deadnames his daughter.
“Clean Slate” is partly autobiographical. Laverne Cox, like her character Desiree, grew up in Mobile, Ala.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)
Whatever bigotry is portrayed here — like when the local pastor refuses to hug Desiree the way he does all other church-going ladies — is defanged by the loving community that surrounds the Slates. That may well be what’s most radical about the show.
Desiree, who’s often driven by the lessons she’s learned in therapy (“Be present, curious and nonjudgmental,” she reminds herself on the bus on the way to Alabama), is allowed to merely wrestle with the ups and downs of being a human being. Her tiffs with Harry are less about her transition and more about the kind of differences a father and daughter would have after they’ve been estranged for decades.
“What I find really interesting is that, in real life when I’m with my mother, sometimes she’ll say something and I’ll feel 11 years old again,” Cox shares. “And I felt that as Desiree. I felt like there were certain moments where George would say something or some dynamic would come up, and I would feel like a little kid. I think that’s a great thing for people to see and experience.”
Laverne Cox and George Wallace in a scene from Prime Video’s “Clean Slate.”
(Courtesy of Prime)
Desiree’s desire to reconnect with her father doesn’t ignore the hurt and trauma she experienced as a child. The show offers a vision of trans childhood that earnestly asks not for mere tolerance or acceptance but for affirmation. For Cox, who broke ground when she became the first openly trans performer to earn an Emmy nomination for “Orange Is the New Black,” there’s an urgency to such a plea. A little more than a decade since she was featured on the cover of Time magazine for an article titled “The Transgender Tipping Point,” Cox has seen firsthand how rhetoric about the trans community has shifted.
“At the time, journalists wanted to talk to trans people,” Cox says. “They were like, ‘Let’s bring a trans person to talk about this.’ Then there was a period when the right wing got a really good strategy together. They were, like, ‘We’re gonna focus on sports. That’ll be the gateway into taking away all trans people’s rights.’ And it worked out very well for them. Then we stopped seeing them talk with trans people, and they were just talking about us and just making up all kinds of insane things. We were just cut out of the conversation and deeply dehumanized.”
“Clean Slate” is a chance to offer a counter narrative. It imagines a world not without transphobia but with enough love to go around that such discrimination doesn’t drown out Desiree’s day-to-day existence, let alone her dignity. It is as didactic as it is aspirational — especially at a time when executive orders from President Trump continue to target and erase trans lives.
Subplots in the show’s first few episodes center on mundane scenarios, like career day at the local school and football games during yard sales. Desiree spends her days flirting with hunky car wash employee Mack (Jay Wilkison) while mentoring his precocious young daughter Opal (Norah Murphy). She eggs on her closeted BFF Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu) to get on Grindr and sidles up to his church-going mother Ella (Telma Hopkins). All the while, Desiree puts her years of therapy to work as she and Harry return to each other’s lives.
“I felt like there were certain moments where George would say something or some dynamic would come up, and I would feel like a little kid. I think that’s a great thing for people to see and experience,” says Laverne Cox about working with her co-star George Wallace.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)
On and offscreen, Wallace and Cox make for a hilarious odd couple; she a vision in restraint (today in a killer bob and vintage Mugler), he an explosion of spontaneity (in a plain leather jacket and cap). Cox, like Desiree, is big on therapyspeak. She hopes this show can help bridge differences, open audiences to see the humanity in one another and have it serve as a way to fight the current rhetoric that is tearing people apart.
“There’s something about the internet and this culture right now where dehumanization is just rampant,” Cox says. “Not just with trans people — with everyone. We disagree politically and we just say dehumanizing things. And, for me, that’s just the worst thing in the world. Because when you dehumanize people, then you can commit violence against them. You can take away their rights.”
For Wallace, it’s all just as simple. Even as he sits back in awe listening to his younger co-star, he approaches his answers with his requisite no-nonsense humor.
“I’m a horse of a different color,” he says. “I’ve always been ahead of my time. I grew up loving people, respecting everybody. I’m a child of the ’70s and ’80s. I learned to love people in New York City. It’s really who I am. I don’t care who you are, what you are, where you’re coming from, or where you’re going. If you’re a nice person, I’m gonna love you. And you’re gonna love me, too. I’m gonna make you love me if you don’t. And that’s who Harry is.”
“I’ve always been ahead of my time. I grew up loving people, respecting everybody. I’m a child of the ’70s and ’80s. I learned to love people in New York City. It’s really who I am,” says comedian George Wallace.
(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)
Such different but complementary approaches are mirrored in “Clean Slate” and showcase how the two tackled the comedic sensibility of the show.
“I may have done comedy before, but not with a legend like this,” Cox says, remembering how she first saw Wallace on “The Tonight Show” in the ’80s.
Moreover, given how close to home the premise of the show is for Cox, she worked with her acting coach to better harness the way some of the dialogue and subplots — not to mention the set on which they shot — triggered her own past trauma.
“It was very intimidating finding my comedic voice while being the kind of actress who wants to be grounded in the character’s unfulfilled needs and all that stuff,” she says.
Wallace, who’s had a long career as a stand-up comedian, is finally a leading man on television in his 70s. And it’s for a role that is ready-made for his affable and playfully abrasive sense of humor.
“Meanwhile, I’m an idiot,” Wallace says with a chuckle. “She was all of these things, studied and went to college and learned how to act and all of that stuff. I just come out and go ‘What the hell you doing?!’ But this chemistry is just awesome.”
Onscreen, that tug-and-pull plays out like a modern queer riff on “Sanford and Son.”
“I’m learning who she is,” Wallace says about Cox and Desiree alike, wistfully summing up what “Clean Slate” aspires to be. “I’m learning a lot. And that’s what I think the show is really about. Me being educated in America about how to live, how to love and how to laugh.”
