Starz ‘P-Valley’ Season 2: TV Review

There’s no reason it shouldn’t be surprising that the most exciting, layered television treatment for the chaotic, COVID-infested summer and fall of 2020 didn’t come from medical procedures or one of the many shows that tested Zoom-based episodes, but rather the second season of starz P valley.

Sure, the famous drama Katori Hall is built around the fictional Mississippi Delta around a strip club and features the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s trademark theatrical dialogue, but it ran for eight episodes. P valley Single base formulation.

P valley It’s a restless sensory experience, with neon-encrusted imagery dominated by muscular, glowing bodies, the soundtrack’s rumbling bass ending with a wet mismatch of an overloaded juke joint and ending with a grass-winged hippo in The Pynk. The show is sharp and firmly grounded in the economic reality shared by its characters and the city of Chukali. During the first half of the 10-episode second season, in addition to a variety of narrative delights, P valley It proves to be more than a machine capable of processing a difficult moment in history.

The new season picks up a few months after the momentous events of “Murda’s Night” at The Pynk, the finale where they took up arms, ended their lives and revealed the truth. Not much time has passed, but enough to make serious changes.

After paying cash to buy The Pynk in the end, Hale (Elarika Johnson) and Uncle Clifford (Nico Annan) had to move their business to an accessible road, where a liar was hit and crushed by a car. Free laundry and wings helped support the salaries of some dancers and other staff. Mercedes (Brand Evans), unable to escape Pink no matter how hard she tries, remains in the main raffle for the new business as they await the opening of their gym in what has become a ghost town on the Strip Mall.

Some of the characters are struggling with new realities, including business investor Andre (Parker Sawyer), who looked like a big loser when Haley won the casino for The Pynk, but returns to Chukali after a local tragedy.

Some of the characters really thrive, including Mercedes’ mother Patrice (dynamite Harriet D. Foy), whose makeshift church has become the center of the community, providing us with food boxes and inspirational records.

Somewhere in the middle are Caeson (Shannon Thornton), who has built a brand of products and internet following but remains attached to her abusive boyfriend Derrick (Jordan M. Cox); And Lil Shit (J. Alphons Nicholson), whose rap career is gaining traction, even as he worries about blowing up Uncle Clifford.

all about it P valley It expands for the second season. There are more episodes (10 out of eight), more characters and more locations. At the same time, the boundaries of Chukali expand as Hall and the filmmakers build this city on the brink of economic collapse, underscoring both the cost of a pandemic and the chance of survival, no matter how elusive the casino may offer.

Worldbuilding, which continues to position Chukali as a more modern and inclusive answer to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatava County, is an effective cover for a season that may have a less dramatic lineup than the first.

It hasn’t always been easy to keep track of what was happening with Hale, her TV hoax, and her traumatic connections to the devastating storm, but mystery brought the first season. There’s a lot going on this time around, some as factual as the upcoming election with some major initiatives and some intriguingly weird – any show where the leadership is as lovable as Uncle Clifford. To something strange – as a detour to the sacred supernatural that emphasizes P valleyOn the shoulders of the profane and the saint.

The show’s heightened sense of reality is also highlighted in the fifth episode, which breaks format, delves deeper into Caeson’s story, and brings the series’ fabulous subtext to the fore as a companion experiment, if not an outright hit.

Clearly, the payoff comes with the escalation of tension with Uncle Clifford and Hale for control of Pink. The new dancers Whisper (Salmos Salazar), Roulette (Gail Bean) and Big Bone (Miracle Watts) are clearly unknown. also you have Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Veteran John Clarence Stewart offers a very different threat to Zoe as an ex-con named Big Teak. Perhaps some of this news will get more fascinating as the season draws to a close.

This is the real world that offers the most drama, and much of what’s so exciting about the season so far comes from the ears of these color-defined characters responding to COVID individually. Of course, Uncle Clifford will find a way to incorporate fabulous skins into his ensemble, much to his skeptical grandmother’s dismay (Loretta Divain, as always, offers the utmost importance regardless of screen time).

It is impressive to see the roles of masks in an environment where each character was previously represented with metaphorical masks, which adds layers to the thinking of people who hide their identity and their secrets in a business where revealing everything is a job. Hall can identify tragedy and comedy in the darkest moments of the pandemic, moving exclusively in the dark when it comes to racial injustice and protests against summer police brutality.

If today is not a draw for you, P valley Still with an explosive wall-to-wall soundtrack and a pervasive saturation atmosphere, the show opens in December and may require air conditioning.

The dance remains much more surprisingly athletic than the exploration, using topical sensuality as a spice rather than a core course. The set is so deep and serves Hall’s profane verbal combat so well that it didn’t particularly bother me that most episodes sent to critics couldn’t be contained at standard hourly speeds. Hall’s characters always have something to say, and in these episodes the writer has a lot to say and a lot to say; the series goes on to say those words in her convenient, painful, thick accented voice.