The series deals with a special experience driven by the lives of naked dancers at work in the Dirty Delta while facing a different path in their lives together. Now, these criminals emerge and lead a series of challenges facing the reality of these dancers together.
P-Valley is a trip, and an experience, and one that feels like nothing else on TV. You may smell the sweat the deeper in you get, but you won't be eager to leave.
Despite the show's wonderful specificity of place and its clearly defined characters, the plot can be slow and repetitive, or sometimes feel disconnected. It's easy to feel connected to P-Valley's overall world, though.
The cast is uniformly excellent but the central trio of Evans, Annan and Johnson especially so, making the most of often luscious dialogue that veers between playfully obscene and heartbreakingly forlorn.
It's some heavy stuff, but the series lands as lightly and purposefully as the actors themselves do after risky pole-dancing routines that will have you fearing for their very necks. Eye-opening telly.
The show understands the dreams and challenges of its captivating characters the way an exotic dancer knows the physics of her own body. And when it takes the stage and gets in the zone, it positively flies.
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.
The plotting is convoluted at times, and the ongoing hints about Autumn's traumatic past feel unnecessarily vague. But Hall's characters and the cast - especially Evans and Annan - are vibrant and compelling.
P-Valley blends the profane, the sacred, and the politics of the almighty dollar to tell engrossing stories about Black women on the margins who use their bodies to keep families and communities afloat. It's also one of the year's best new shows.
[It] behaves like theater a lot, with big acting that will project to the back of your TV room and a Southern Gothic script whose dialogue has a clear poetic bent. I didn't mind it, but I needed to adjust to the staginess.
