Amazon Prime Video, owned by multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, has canceled Clean Slate, one of the few streaming series led by a trans woman.
The show premiered on Feb. 6 and ran for only three months until Amazon axed it, reported Deadline. Laverne Cox, the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category, starred as the show’s main protagonist with legendary comedian George Wallace as her estranged father.
The cancellation comes only months after Bezos erased statements pledging “equity for Black people,” “LGBTQ+ rights,” and any mention of “transgender” from Amazon’s website in December, reported The Washington Post, also owned by Bezos. Amazon was also one of the biggest corporations to overhaul its website following President Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Cox, Wallace, and co-creator Dan Ewen broke the news that a Clean Slate wasn’t returning for another season in a guest column for Deadline.
“By the end of March, our eight-episode series, our labor of love, was canceled,” the column begins. “A seven-year effort was gone in a puff of sever exhaust.”
It continues: “Please forgive the word count. This s— was cheaper than therapy.”
Clean Slate was backed by the legendary late screenwriter and producer Norman Lear, who died of cardiac arrest in late 2023. The show was reportedly his last completed project.
In making the show—which centered on bridging familial and political divides, with Alabama as its backdrop—the actors shared that its script often transcended their own life experiences.
“Laverne, one of precious few Alabamans to appear on both the cover of Time magazine and British Vogue, had spent the prior 90 minutes entertaining dozens of questions about transness from the ever-curious Norman,“ the article noted, springing back to the days before the cancellation. ”It was a fantastic conversation, and we would wager it was Norman’s first meeting where he would find himself addressed as ‘guuuurl’ 17 times.
The article also lauded Lear for being able to empathize with experiences different than his own, despite his awesome age. (He was 101 when he died.)
“Some of Lear’s questions were too personal, some overly medical,” wrote Cox, Wallace and Ewen in Deadline. “Laverne’s retort, ‘That information is between me and my doctor and my boyfriend,’ would end up in the pilot script. But Norman’s questions were evidence of a mind that had remained open, decades after most people’s have welded shut and whatnot.”
The article also reminisces on the moment the series was introduced to the world: “It was a fight, but our joyful, aspirational comedy about a trans Black woman returning to South as her true self had gone from just an inkling to a billboard in Midtown,” they wrote.
But it too soon it disappeared, the the show’s stars writing that they “mourn the characters being scrubbed from storytelling out of fear.”
They added, “We will push to keep the story alive, for the sake of the kind of people portrayed in it, the kind of people being legislated out of existence, or erased from history books.”
Before late December, Amazon had a webpage that said it was “working at the U.S. federal and state level on legislation” to protect transgender people. It also noted that the company provided “gender transition benefits based on the Standards of Care published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).” The section with those claims was completely scrapped, though a company spokesperson maintained at the time that the benefit was still available, according to WaPo.
Amazon also changed its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” page to “Inclusive Experiences and Technology” and cut an entire section saying that the company stood “in solidarity” with Black employees and customers.
After killing a WaPo op-ed endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, Bezos also reportedly ordered the paper to rewire its opinion page to solely focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”
