Why did it take until P-Valley for a show to be set in a strip club?

The Ringer

"Why not do The Sopranos, but with the Bada Bing in the center, not the background?" asks Alison Herman. "The ungenerous answer is that a show about a strip club would have to ground itself in the perspective of female, often nonwhite sex workers, which is not something our culture has generally been wont to do. The more charitable answer acknowledges that overcoming this bias takes time and consideration, lest the show in question perpetuate a two-dimensional view of stripping instead of correcting for it. And that’s not even accounting for the production value required to stage show-stopping dance numbers for the screen. Such challenges explain why it took five years for Katori Hall’s 2015 play Pussy Valley to become the new Starz show P-Valley, which loses a few letters in translation but gains a new platform. (The abbreviation is to get around cable providers who wouldn’t list the series’ full title, though the pretense is about as thin as some of the performers’ stage outfits.) The delay is understandable, but the final product proves worth the wait. P-Valley shows the strip club is as seamless a fit for the small screen as its mix of spectacle and substance would suggest. And after a few years in development, P-Valley may have landed at just the right time."

ALSO:

• How P-Valley creator Katori Hall used the "Delta Noir" aesthetic to subvert the male gaze?: "There are a ton of images out in the world that have Black women as hypersexualized, and a lot of Black women have inherited all of that baggage," says Hall. "So we had filming conversations about how we were going to frame it, in terms of camera placement and camera movement, so that it always felt like we were behind the eyes of the women who were experiencing this world, and centering their perspective and their desires. For example, there’s a moment in episode two where you have a woman doing a lap dance, and the men think of her as a sexual object, but we wanted the audience to experience her feeling like a sexual object. So instead focusing completely on her body, we pushed in on her face. We were putting the audience in her high heels so they could understand how it feels to be looked down upon, to be subjugated, to have your ass grabbed by a stranger."
• Nicco Annan, who plays Uncle Clifford, discusses playing a genderqueer character like nothing TV has ever seen: "Let me tell you something," says Annan. "Uncle Clifford to me is just all things. How she wakes up and how she feels that day, that’s how she dresses. Getting dressed to go to that loan office was really heavy. We shot that pretty early on. I just thought about my nails. My nails emotionally kind of took me out because I felt like I was having to remove. I knew that I was going to a place that did not understand Uncle Clifford fully and that would ridicule her. And, you know, possibly might not give her a loan because of how she’s dressed, who she is and how she identifies and moves through the world. But she still had to put on her wigs. She still was not going to totally succumb to it. As gay people, as black people — marginalized communities — you learn how to have activism and survival at the same time. I like that the show is a piece of work in a world that shows how things can work together. How, you know, healthy relationships between communities can coexist. But at the same time, how there is still oppression."