Get a first look at Laverne Cox’s new comedy series Clean Slate — and learn how it honors Norman Lear (exclusive)

Sometimes, we all could use a fresh start. For Laverne Cox, her Clean Slate was years in the making. 

The Emmy nominee stars in Prime Video’s upcoming comedy series Clean Slate, which follows Cox’s Desiree Slate as she returns home to Mobile, Ala., after leaving home for New York as a teenager. She's there to reconnect with her dad, outspoken carwash owner Harry Slate (George Wallace) — who, after receiving an email from his estranged child, was expecting to find a son on his doorstep. 

“After being away for 23 years and, she says in the pilot, being in really dysfunctional relationships with men, she realizes that she has to go back to the source of the first unavailable man in her life, and that's her father,” Cox tells Entertainment Weekly, teasing that “we discover throughout the series that there are other reasons why she's come back home, as well.” 

Desiree’s return to Alabama also reunites her with her childhood best friend Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu), the local closeted choir director, and introduces her to Mack (Jay Wilkison), her dad’s car wash employee and single dad to 10-year-old Opal (Norah Murphy).  

Cox executive produces the series with Brent Miller, costar Wallace and co-showrunners Simran Baidwan and Dan Ewen, who first brought the idea to the actress seven years ago. “It was going to be like a 45-minute meeting, and it turned into four hours,” Cox recalls, adding that she and her manager “loved Dan and loved the idea of this woman going home again to reconnect with her dad after many years away.” 

Within a week of their initial meeting, Ewen had a pilot script, and they eventually met with “the icon, the legend, the late Norman Lear,” Cox says, to land at Act III Productions. “And that meeting with Norman was a dream.” 

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But like all dreams, it came with a wake-up call. “It was also very intimidating pitching with Norman Lear,” the Orange Is the New Black star says, recalling her very first pitch meeting alongside the producing legend. “So our first pitch meeting, we're in with Norman Lear, and George Wallace is there, and Mr. Lear is like — well, he said he liked to be called Norman — he's like, ‘We have this great cast and why don't you improvise the scene from the pilot?’ He didn't tell us we would be doing this. And so George and I began to improvise the scene of me coming back for the first time and [George] seeing me for the first time in 23 years. And after that first pitch meeting, we were having coffee and debriefing, and Norman said to me, 'For the next meeting, that was good... can you do it, but funny?’” 

That humor, which is at the heart of Clean Slate, is “very much a tribute to the legacy of Norman Lear and tackling intense issues, but doing it in a fun way, in a way that's accessible and in a way that doesn't point a finger at you or preach to you,” Cox says, referencing “the iconic television created in the ‘70s and ‘80s that were family comedies that had political messages, but it didn't hit you over the head with it.” 

“Ultimately, this show is about love, this show is about family, and trying to figure out how to connect after being away from each other and figuring out how to connect across generations and experiences,” Cox says. “Desiree has gone and lived. She's grown up in New York and become a very different person beyond her gender identity, but just culturally. And so it's really about that and this father who loves his daughter unconditionally and all the other families that sort of exist in the show, Louis and his mom, and Opal and Mac. So it's a show about family.” 

The family fun begins Feb. 6 on Prime Video. See first-look images of the series above.