P-Valley‘s first season has proven a smash hit for Starz, garnering a rare 100 critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes and overwhelmingly positive fan reaction. Even Cardi B is talking about her love for it. Exploring all the goes on inside The Pynk, a strip club in a fictional town deep in the Mississippi Delta, P-Valley explores the lives of Black women who haven’t been depicted with such humanity before: strippers who keep their families and community afloat. Through telling their stories, viewers get an up close and personal glimpse at how hard their jobs are and the complexities of their lives, but get so many more intriguing narratives, including the revolutionary relationship between Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda.
The Season 1 finale will wrap up a lot of loose ends, revealing what really happened to Autumn Night (Elarica Johnson), what will happen to the soon-to-be-shuttered Pynk, and whether or not Mercedes (Brandee Evans) will really hang up her heels for good. While fans await that last episode, they should know the good and bad news about their new favorite series. First, it’s been renewed for Season 2 and, unfortunately, there’s no word yet on exactly when that’s going to hit screens. Still, TV Guide was able to extract some details about P-Valley Season 2. Here’s everything we know so far.
Starz renewed P-Valley for Season 2 early, which bodes well. Starz announced a Season 2 after only three episodes of P-Valley had aired, which is s huge vote of confidence in its future. Fingers crossed it becomes the next Power so we get five more seasons and four spin-offs.
P-Valley Season 2 will have more episodes than Season 1, going from eight episodes to 10. Obviously, that means lots more room to tell more stories, perhaps digging more into characters’ back story and further developing the relationships and conflicts we’ve seen in Season 1.
No word on timing. Of course, COVID-19 has complicated everything, and though filming is starting to pick back up in cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta — where shooting took place on Tyler Perry’s enormous studios that are now back in full swing — no timeline for resuming production has been revealed yet.
Season 2 may explore sex work more directly. In a previous interview with TV Guide, creator Katori Hall said that very often, academics lump strippers in the “sex work” category and although those are related and sometimes overlap, they’re not the same. She said that she’s interested in subsequent storylines taking on what’s traditionally regarded as sex work, which we didn’t see in Season 1.
Season 2 will likely examine the ramifications of COVID too. Hall said one of the things she was thinking about was how the pandemic closed avenues dedicated to live performance. A playwright herself, Hall said, “There’s a story to tell about how black folks are affected by this disease,” and with the strip club closed, “how they figured out what to do to survive.”
Elarica Johnson, Shannon Thornton, Brandee Evans, P-Valley
