P-Valley review – strip club drama is one of the year's best new shows
P-Valley, the stingingly fresh if unfortunately named Starz series by playwright Katori Hall about a strip club in the Mississippi Delta, frequently strips the pole dance of its sheen. (The show’s name is short for Pussy Valley, Hall’s 2015 play on which it’s based.) In the middle of a routine, the show cuts the beat – you hear only the heavy breathing of Mercedes (Brandee Evans), as she holds a plank feet off the ground, the squeaky strain of the pole as she launches her red stilettos around, around and down the stage. The club is awash in dollar bills and cheers, packed with men, but the camera’s focus remains on Mercedes’s work – the finesse of pole-dancing as athletic feat, her body a beacon of training and talent, rather than sex appeal. This is her job, her art, and she’s incredible at it.
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The direction of Mercedes’s solo performance, as with so many of the strip sequences and P-Valley’s ethos at large, is un-exploitative and deliberate, a reorientation of the strip club to its workers and chosen family. P-Valley, co-written by Hall and almost entirely female writing staff, each episode directed by one of eight different women, resets the classic TV trope of a beloved joint to the deep south. As told almost entirely by black female and queer characters, it’s one of the year’s best new television series.
Like Hustlers, last year’s hit film on New York City strippers-turned-con artists under the strain of the recession whose female director, Lorene Scafaria, focused on the competitive, expansive friendships between the dancers, P-Valley navigates the humming ecosystem of the club. It’s a swirl of business acumen required in selling fantasy for cash, the strategy of working the floor, stripping as an economic and mental game of navigating social hierarchy and the line between performance and intimacy. But whereas Hustlers’ arc hinges on one long ruse – the one-last-job fleecing of unsympathetic finance bros – P-Valley instead views dancing as work and art, its signature Pynk Club as a home base worth fighting for rather than escape.
The ambitious, eight-episode series does unveil ruses bound to explode: the first episode begins with detritus floating in muddy floodwater, a lost driver’s license recovered by a dirt-streaked, muddy woman introduced as Autumn Night (ex-EastEnders actor Elarica Johnson) fleeing a violent past. She finds a hideout as a dancer, and haunted new girl disrupter, at the Pynk, the longstanding domain of Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), a black, gender non-binary diva (who uses she/her pronouns). Annan doesn’t waste a single minute of screen time in making Clifford one of the most compelling and vibrant new characters of the year; buoyant and bristled, a bon vivant who never reuses a wig, saddled with debt but tactical in his power plays, a business owner whose project is just as much mentorship of the girls as “booty money”.
Over the course of eight episodes, P-Valley meanders through a world of business, deception, characters screwing over and getting screwed over, a fresh tour of the “Dirty Delta” south still suffused with racism; the hierarchy of skin color (the politics of colorism – privileged “high yellow”, “blue-black” wielded as descriptor or insult – pepper the show’s dialogue, particularly in reference to the performers). All of the Pynk family, including the male staff of cooks, the DJ, accountant with a criminal record who find shelter and employment at the club, are threatened by a casino clandestinely planned for the club’s riverfront land, whose white owners have no qualms seeking removal over fair compensation. The threat of confiscation by shady, though legal, means is heralded by the arrival of Andre (Parker Sawyer) an Atlanta-based lawyer with roots in the Delta, whose conflicting loyalties to the casino deal and the town’s mayor, and an attraction to Autumn blow the plan open.
The first season unveils a merry-go-round of vulnerabilities, characters linked by a circle of achilles heels. For Uncle Clifford, it’s bailing out a boat filling with debt without letting on and navigating a clandestine relationship with the aspiring local rapper Lil Murda (J Alphonse Nicholson), whose tough exterior masks stage fright and naivety to the risks of publicly queer relationships in the Delta. Murda wants his music “blessed” by the dance of Mercedes, the club’s “OG” lead dancer, steely but repeatedly undercut by the judgment of her holy-roller mother, Patrice, herself underestimated and discounted as a pastor by the men at her beloved church. Set to move on from the club – her final dance the gossip of the town for the season’s first half – Mercedes has saved her “stacks” for her dream of owning a majorette’s gym; her relinquishing the throne opens the door for Keyshawn (Shannon Thornton), AKA “Miss Mississippi”, a saucy and self-doubting dancer whose preternatural bubbliness is stifled by the abusive father of her young daughter.
P-Valley hooks in with Hall’s dialogue, which undulates and swerves, melodic and vulgar at once, cascading so fast sometimes it’s hard to catch on the first go round. Though sometimes veering into the heavy monologues more fit for the stage, it’s an easy rhythm to submerge in for an episode, or four, or all eight. The troubles in P-Valley feel both substantial, genuinely life-altering, and the germane hurdles imposed by a country designed to wring profit out of segregation and economic segmentation. But for all the rot coursing through, P-Valley is blisteringly entertaining, its dance sequences regularly outdoing J Lo’s star-cementing turn in Hustlers, a show with firm command on its world, of the numerous faces – flattering and not – presented by each character. The end of the season leaves more threads loose and waving than tied up; everyone a little compromised, everyone with more work to do. It would be a shame not to see more of it.
P-Valley starts on Starz in the US on 12 July with a UK date to follow
