Katori Hall, the writer and the creator of the hit show P-Valley, sits down with Leah Donnella and Gene Demby to talk about Hall’s purpose for creating the show. P-Valley is a show about the lives of the owner and the exotic dancers that work at a fictional strip club named The Pynk in a fictional town named Chucalissa, Mississippi. P-Valley discusses many touchy topics like poverty, stripping and prostitution, drug dealing, gang participation, struggles with sexuality and mental health, suicide, and domestic violence in relationships. Hall states that producers and potential actors were hesitant to take on the show because they were worried about the stigmatization surrounding some of the topics discussed in the show. However, she made it clear that she wanted to humanize many of these issues that currently happen in the black community. She wanted people and specifically the entertainment industry to have a different look at that kind of life. She feels that other movies and shows put black characters in a box; For example, she mentions that previous movies about strippers often stigmatized strippers to be single mothers or “the stripper with the gold heart” and she really wanted to paint a different, more realistic picture of the struggles that black women, black men, and black queer men face. She mentions multiple times wanting to represent the entire black community in the show and not just one piece of it. She states that by humanizing these issues, the community can start to tackle them differently; She states that they are “trying to put vitamins in the kool-aid.”
I, personally, watch the show P-Valley and I absolutely agree with both Hall’s intentions and the way she represents that purpose in the show. As the audience watches many of the character’s lives, both past and present, they can tell that are still transforming during the show. Within the two seasons, you see the rapper grow more comfortable in his true skin, we see another exotic dancer building her bravery to her abusive boyfriend, we see another exotic dancer make her dream of retiring come true while we see the owner of the club save the club. These are just some of the main characters however the audience sees every character go through their own individual transformation whether it be for the good or bad. She truly does represent multiple identities in the black community.