Our take
Written proudly in the Mississippi vernacular, P-Valley tells a story of sex, trauma, and ambition in a totally unembellished way. There’s something decidedly un-Hollywood about it, both in the way it embraces its Black and Southern roots and in how it portrays stripping as the athletic feat it truly is. So even if the show deals with adult subject matter it’s never lurid or exploitative, and it becomes a series just as much about the craft of exotic dancing and hip hop as it is about money and struggle. Even the more unwieldy parts of the series’s storytelling help add up to an authentic portrait, bathed in gorgeous night club colors and crisp Southern images.
What it won
Spirit Awards
1 nom
The story
Down deep in the Mississippi Delta, Trap music meets film noir in this kaleidoscopic story of a little-strip-club-that-could and the big characters who come through its doors—the hopeful, the lost, the broken, the ballers, the beautiful, and the damned.
Elsewhere
"With a keen understanding of stigma and the limits of race, class, and colorism, showrunner Katori Hall has fashioned a story that distills the microcosm of a specific kind of sex work into an avenue for empathy."
— Cate Young
"It's a lyrical and atmospheric series that centers on lives of a community unlike anything television has seen before."
— Tambay Obenson
Streaming arrival
Who picked it
Emil Hofileña is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. He also writes as a theater critic, with work published in Rogue and Out of Print, among others. He’s probably crying over a movie or an episode as we speak.
