Illustration by Jeanne Detallante

“Please don’t do that to me—betray me and then tell me it’s a gift,” Rabbi Raquel says to Josh Pfefferman, who is trying to put a positive spin on having spilled the couple’s secrets to the world. Raquel’s plea may as well be printed as a motto on the Pfefferman insignia, a warning from this seduction-addicted family of Semitic shape-shifters.

Jill Soloway’s stealth masterpiece “Transparent,” which is now in its second season, on Amazon, is a different kind of seducer, a TV series that makes revolutionary art seem both irresistible and inevitable. The story of a Los Angeles family whose elderly father comes out as transgender, transitioning from Mort into Maura (and from Poppa into Moppa), “Transparent” would have won polite praise even if it were merely a piece of well-made agitprop—a ted Talk on trans identity. Instead, it dived, quick and confident, into murkier waters, exploring themes less comforting but more interesting than “love makes a family” sloganeering. Soloway’s world is aggressively specific: Jewy, screwy, L.A., upper middle class, not so much queer-friendly as queer-saturated. It’s role-model free. There are tears but no tearjerking. Soloway likes to talk about the “female gaze,” film-studies jargon that might raise an eyebrow. But the show makes the case for her fluid aesthetic, as well as for the “transfirmative action” program that she created for staff writers. Politics sharpen rather than blunt her artistic daring. As Grace Paley put it, “You write from what you know, but you write into what you don’t know.”

If you are averse to spoilers, don’t read on, because I’m about to go into some detail about the arc of the season, including revelations that are hinted at during the opening episode, in which an ecstatic performance of the Jewish wedding hora—big red lips ululating “Hava Nagila,” a young man whipping off his dress coat and entering into a trance—flashes us back to late-Weimar Berlin. But long story short: for most of the Pfeffermans, things did not get better. When Maura opened that closet, a black wave of secrets gushed out, from parental neglect to Josh’s entanglement, as a teen-ager, with a predatory female babysitter. Maura’s ex-wife, Shelly, and his three kids began to transition, too, like some Jewish rumspringa. Sarah wrecked her marriage for a giddy, idiotic affair with a woman; Josh took up with Rabbi Raquel (the wonderfully heimische Kathryn Hahn); and Ali wrenched her sexuality into new shapes, lit up by the idea that gender might be a playground rather than a prison.

The second season begins with Sarah’s wedding to that girlfriend, Tammy (the terrific Melora Hardin), a fancy event that goes spectacularly south. In a bravura opening sequence, the camera stays static, like a parody of the “Modern Family” titles, as Pfeffermans drift in and out of the wedding photographer’s frame, bickering, primping, as uncontrollable as a weather system. By the time Sarah stumbles down the aisle, her eyes twitching between thick bars of kohl, we’ve entered a tunnel of paranoia, edited as a panic attack; midway through their vows, she looks up and spots a plane pulling a banner that reads “WeBuyUglyHouses.com.” Afterward, Sarah is hysterical with regret, hiding in the bathroom: she hates her bride, she sobs, and her in-laws, too, “those fucking Wasps”—she wants out. To her relief, the marriage isn’t legal yet. “So what is a wedding, then?” Ali asks, amazed. “It’s a ritual,” Rabbi Raquel explains, calmly. “A pageant. It’s like a very expensive play.”

It would be easy to peg Sarah as a spoiled asshole. (Her exes certainly do.) She’s a checked-out mom, a sybarite with time on her hands. And yet the show’s miracle—and that of Amy Landecker’s scorched performance, with her bitter bark of a laugh—is how much it forces you to empathize with Sarah’s most confused desires, and with those of Josh (Jay Duplass) and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), a pair of snake charmers who may as well be selling Amway when it comes to intimacy. Like Larry David or Hannah Horvath, these are selfish people you can’t look away from, because they’re smart and funny, but also because the show presents their cruellest mistakes with clear eyes. On Yom Kippur, Sarah visits the bride she’s ditched, full of empty amends. “It’s kind of like trick-or-treating,” she says. “You go to people that you’ve hurt—you think about your wrongs and apologize and then ask for forgiveness. And then you get forgiveness. And then you sort of absolve yourself.” “Cool,” Tammy replies, eyes arctic. As she walks away, she deadpans, “Happy Yom Kippur.”

One of the show’s riskiest choices is its bluntness about the fact that Maura—so tentative in her flowing muumuus—retains much of the cranky, entitled privilege of Mort. In one scene, a lesbian poet (Cherry Jones) confronts Maura about her having blackballed female job applicants in grad school; in another, Maura’s extremely patient trans friend, Davina, an H.I.V.-positive ex-prostitute, reads her the riot act for class condescension. Maura reacts badly every time. And yet, owing to Jeffrey Tambor’s nervy performance, we also see that Maura is courageous just for refusing to disappear, to shrivel into little-old-ladyhood.

In one painful scene, she flirts with a woman at a bar, only to be stung by the revelation that her charm no longer translates, that she’s now “creepy.” And, in a beautifully filmed sex scene, Moppa fingers her ex-wife in the bathtub, an act that feels at once transgressive, tender, and cold. On one level, Shelly is coercing her ex-husband, taking advantage of the fact that Maura is temporarily homeless. But Maura is in control, too, and there’s dominance in the way she reaches beneath the water: with this one woman, she’s wanted, competent. Refreshingly, sex is never a trivial matter on “Transparent,” and although there’s plenty of nudity—and some cathartic spanking—it’s never filmed for formulaic kicks. From the show’s perspective, there’s a reason that sex is called “knowing” someone. If you ruin your life for it, maybe your life needed ruining.

In last season’s most revelatory episode, Mort traded his daughter’s bat mitzvah for his shot at liberation. On the date of what would have been Ali’s coming-of-age celebration, he snuck out of town, ostensibly to an academic conference but in reality to a retreat for cross-dressers. High on the joy of being seen, Mort recognizes the truth: he’s not a man with a kink but a woman. Yet his breakthrough was built on a lie, a false bottom beneath their family album. It’s a lesson his kids appear to have absorbed, the hard stratagems of the closet. Unlike a Lannister, a Pfefferman rarely pays her debts.

This season extends that theme of buried memories much further, with a risky gambit: surreal flashbacks to a Holocaust trauma, two generations earlier in the Pfefferman line. Many of these visions spiral around Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, one of the earliest pro-gay, pro-trans research institutions, and another carnival—a free space for erotic outsiders, where a liberated set kept dancing on the lip of the volcano, even as Fascism bubbled up. In contrast with the spontaneity of the modern scenes, these flashbacks are slightly candied, with the incongruity of dreams. The wonderful trans actress Hari Nef plays Tante Gittel, a mysterious ancestor whose pearl ring has been passed down to Maura’s children. She feels like an iconic character in a fairy tale about transformation (and isn’t every fairy tale about transformation?).