More than a sitcom: The Switch promises respectful representation

Amy Fox as “Chris” 

At its most basic, The Switch is the story of Sü, a recently out transsexual who finds herself having to adjust to unemployment and sleeping on her ex’s couch. Thematically, it deals with community, identity and inequality. Culturally, it is groundbreaking.

In this world of Hilary Swanks and Felicity Huffmans, it’s rare to see a trans character portrayed by an actual trans person. Rarer still is an ensemble sitcom made up of a predominantly trans cast, all played by trans actors, in a magical-realist setting. In fact, The Switch will be the first. On Nov. 19, executive producer Amy Fox, who also writes and  portrays the character Chris, talked about what The Switch could mean for television.

Hannah Rebecca Ackeral: So, what was the beginning of The Switch?

Amy Fox: A few years ago, I was part of a transgender comedy routine called “Happy Tranny Day,” and afterwards we noticed that there was an interest. People really, really liked being represented in comedy.

Having humor that is from the position of a marginalized group, talking about getting along in a hostile society really lifts people’s spirits. The comedy routine got amazing feedback and it was just a free act that got put together, but trans people are widely dispersed and don’t have a lot of money so it doesn’t really hold together – if you had a band of trans comedians you couldn’t cover gas.

The optimal way to get it to people is through the web, which is why The Switch was originally going to be a web series. When we finished the first webisode and we were looking for Kickstarter funding, I realized that this needs to be a pretty major project.

HRA: How did you put the cast together?

AF: For the web series, we did as much outreach to the trans community as possible.

We looked internationally for the person who was going to play Sü in the web series, which was originally Domaine Javier, who was coming from the United States. Then things changed with the Conservative government, indicating that they’d make it a lot harder to get visas, and then saying it’ll be harder to work with people from out of the country, then saying we can’t give you a low budget agreement if you’re working with actors who don’t have Canadian citizenship.

At the same time, it looked like Domaine would be attending nursing school – she found out she got in right when we finished shooting the first pilot, which was a big deal because she’d actually been kicked out of her first nursing program for being trans. So we lost our main, and the person who was playing Toni was having health issues and the guy who was playing Russell might not have been available. So we thought, “Screw it let’s do casting again.”

As far as building a cast goes, we tried offering free acting lessons for people who were part of the cast, or anyone who was part of the trans community, which opened up to any actor who was less castable. It’s really a community outreach project. We have a way of doing auditions over Skype, a way of people taping auditions and sending them in. We have a thing that breaks down what the audition process is, what’s expected from actors, because often people don’t know how to read a call sheet, that kind of thing.

This is the case with a lot of people who are less castable, especially trans people who also fit into other less castable categories. There are people who would like to act, but couldn’t make a living doing this, couldn’t make enough money acting to pay for acting classes. We asked the union if they had any trans actors, but they couldn’t help us out there. At the time, the union had one out trans actor who had suspended her membership because she was like, “You’re just not getting me parts.”

HRA: One word I’ve seen used a lot to describe the show is “magical.” What’s so magical about it?

AF: One thing we said about this show is that a lot of it is driven by oppression and intersections of oppression and how people deal with that, so the oppression is real and nothing else is. We have elements of fairly tame, magical realism – like characters doing things that don’t really make sense or getting away with things that don’t quite make sense in real life, all the way up to sorcery and pixies. Literal magic. The magic doesn’t solve their problems, which we thought was important, just causes more chaos in their lives.

HRA: It seems like you’ve got a lot of intersectionality of oppression. You’ve got a lot going on in this show that’s harder to address in a sitcom without getting too heavy.

AF: Let’s see, we’ve got the protagonist who is a woman of colour attempting to go through Canadian immigration Services as she’s emigrating from the United States. We have a character who seems to be bumping off people for carbon credits, which is more environmentalism than oppression. We deal with mental health issues, we deal with transphobia in gay and lesbian communities, as well as divisions within trans communities around passability, or race, or sexual orientation.

HRA: How did you approach that during the writing process?

AF: We had a writing team for building the story of the show made up of six or seven people with anti-oppression background and we went over everything really thoroughly. Like, at one point we went over all the characters and realized all the characters we had that are male or masculine are involved in something on a regular basis that is deeply, morally problematic: why are we doing this and what are we saying? I don’t think we’re saying something very good, so let’s change it. So we’d go back and swap the characters around a bit.

We also made a space where people were free to speak their mind about anti-oppression stuff. Where as, if people are the “diversity hire” on a team of writers, then often people feel they have to explain things as “actually, if you write it like this then it’ll be more appealing to a demographic of females of between 15 and 60, which will expand the market appeal” which is them saying “this is incredibly sexist.”

We built an environment where people can say, “This is sexist” or ask, “What is this saying about mental health?” and have a team that is used to that.

HRA: Who is your audience?

AF: Our ideal audience is VOD, where a lot of people would be able to see it that normally wouldn’t be encountering trans content. We’d also like to broadcast on cable and, of course, we’re interested in LGBT channels and we’re looking at setting that up in Europe, but we want to be able to reach more people.

I would feel good if enough people watch it to make a difference in the lives of a lot of trans people, whether the people watching it are trans or cis. I would love to get this thing on Netflix or Hulu. We’re trying to set that up right now, and I think, honestly, that that’ll happen at some point. A lot of these online content distributors, or aggregators of things that have already been made – there’s a lot of people out there who will pay for your television show if you’ve already made a television show, but won’t pay to make it. As long as we can make the first season, I’m sure it’ll end up on Netflix, or whatever the equivalent is in the next few years.

HRA: You changed the formatting, you changed the funding, and you had casting challenges. What other challenges have you faced?

AF: The big challenge is trying to deal with the stigma of making something that’s niche, which is the kiss of death in television marketing.

We went to a convention and oh my god, 90 per cent of the people here are cis gendered, upper class, straight, able-bodied white dudes and all their friends are the same demographic. These are unfortunately the people we have to sell the show to, although they’re not the ones who are watching it. There’s this weird culture in television about not going with anything new, and not doing anything that actually represents people’s day-to-day lives. Dealing with that culture is probably the biggest challenge.

HRA: Laverne Cox is getting a lot of praise for her role on Orange is the New Black as a trans actress playing a trans character. Do you think she’s something of a turning point?

AF: I think we’re going to be seeing more. What it does is it raises the bar in terms of representation. The next time someone makes a TV show and their audiences have all seen Orange is the New Black, if they don’t do a very good job, people will notice. Now, with blog culture, people will call out sexism and racism and ableism and transphobia on television when they see it. If a TV show does messed up things on a regular basis, it’ll lose its audience who cares much faster.

There’s a real hunger out there for something that’s dramatically interesting and respectful. And who ever picks up on that, I feel, stand to be of great cultural significance.