The Southern-Gothic Stripper Drama That TV Deserves

Read: ‘Hustlers’ and the rise of the stripper ensemble film

Hall, who serves as the showrunner and staffed her directing team exclusively with women, trains the lens of the southern gothic on a group that rarely gets such aesthetic treatment: Black women strippers in the “Dirty Delta.” P-Valley is lush, resplendent, and sometimes haunting. All of the women’s strife occurs against the backdrop of sweeping southern vistas or kaleidoscopic lighting, often with eerily bouncing beats soundtracking their dances. Some sequences, such as those in which dancers meet their regulars away from the hectic atmosphere of the club’s main stages, are almost dreamlike. Episode 2, for example, opens inside the “Paradise Room,” where neon-blue lighting and a cloud-shaped bed lend contrast to the dominatrix scene unfolding. Against an ethereal background, the characters carry out fantasies rooted in real-world dangers.

P-Valley is an anomaly in many respects, the rare production that focuses on a strip club without turning its employees into cautionary tales or unilaterally empowered femme fatales. In subject matter, it invites obvious comparisons to the 2019 hit film Hustlers, starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu. But the series benefits from the spaciousness of television as a format: P-Valley combines the weightiness of a premium-cable show with the fun and soapiness you might expect from a BET marathon. We’ve come a long way from The Players Club. P-Valley’s characters live rich, full lives shaped by the region they inhabit. Mercedes in particular is almost impossibly enthralling. She’s a titan onstage, but some of the show’s most revelatory moments are those in which she coaches a teen girls’ dance squad. The teens both idolize Mercedes and wield her job against her, a stark example of the tightrope that she and the other strippers walk no matter how hard they work or how “respectable” they are in other arenas.

But perhaps the most captivating character at The Pynk is Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan, who also played the role in the stage production). Sharp-tongued but kindhearted, Uncle Clifford is a gender-nonconforming entrepreneur whose stunning ensembles rival the women’s stage costumes. It’s partly through Uncle Clifford that the show unravels two of its most interesting subplots: the burgeoning career of the hypermasculine rapper whom Mercedes once dissed, and the potential arrival of a troubling new business in town. These story lines tease out music-industry biases, the omnipresence and danger of homophobia, and the lingering effects of the transatlantic slave trade and the southern plantation economy.

Thankfully, P-Valley isn’t preoccupied with conveying the toll that these forces, or any particular social ill, take on its characters. The show doesn’t just splice its luxurious scenes at The Pynk with shots of hardship in the Delta. But the series does follow its characters outside the club, tracing complicated familial dynamics and dubious romantic relationships. In the first moments of the pilot, a young woman wades aimlessly through the wreckage of a flood, her face bruised and bloodied. Flashbacks of a painful incident wash over her. When she grabs an abandoned suitcase that floats past her, she discovers a lifeline inside: designer clothes and a wallet with an ID that she starts using as her own. It’s not until later in the episode that this woman (Elarica Johnson) adopts the stage name Autumn Night at The Pynk, but her rebirth begins here—in the aftermath of a distinctly southern disaster.