Harry Slate runs a car wash in a small Alabama town. One day an email tells him his child, gone since their teenage years, is coming home. He expects the son who played football. On his porch he finds a woman with a suitcase and a strained smile, who says: “Dad, I’m your daughter, Desiree….I’ve always been Desiree.”
That is the opening of Clean Slate, the Prime Video sitcom that premiered on February 6, 2025. George Wallace plays Harry and Laverne Cox plays Desiree. Cox, Wallace and Dan Ewen wrote the series. Norman Lear, who died in December 2024, was an executive producer, and Metacritic’s summary notes that Harry’s child has been away for 17 years.
What the show is about
Mashable’s review describes a woman who left for New York with big plans, became an aspiring gallery owner, and came home to regroup after the money for her gallery fell through. She brings therapy language and queer culture with her. Harry, who has changed nothing in the family house, is baffled when she talks about relaxing her vagus nerve or serves chia seed pudding. They set up a pronoun jar, and he pays into it whenever he misgenders or deadnames her. “I’m gonna retire off this,” Desiree says.
Most of the town takes her back without a fight. The exception is the pastor. In the fourth episode he shakes her hand the way he would a man’s, and Miss Ella, played by Telma Hopkins, gathers her friends to protest. The review says that storyline returns in the finale.
Critics split on the laughs
The reviews collected by Metacritic agree on the cast and disagree about the jokes. One calls the series “heartfelt, well-acted,” but says the comedy overall is “rather middling.” Another says the dialogue can feel canned, as if waiting a beat for a laugh track, though that sitcom feel might suit some viewers. A third finds the show more a fantasy of societal understanding than an issue-driven comedy, “very rarely producing laughs” but often warm.
Others are warmer. One praises the “vibrant chemistry and comic timing” Wallace and Cox share. Another reviewer says Wallace supplies the few jokes that land and calls the series “more about acceptance than generating laughs.”
Viewer comments on the page lean positive, with one calling it “warm, funny, enlightening” and another saying “a great way for lear to leave us.”
Sources
- Clean Slate Reviews – Metacritic
- 'Clean Slate' review: Norman Lear and Laverne Cox team up for a fresh twist on a classic sitcom formula
