P-Valley comes back to Starz on Friday, December 4 with a two episode premiere, and Season 3 will be the show’s last. The network announced the date and the ending together on Thursday, closing out a wait that has run more than four years since the Season 2 finale aired in August 2022.
The season runs nine episodes, one shy of the ten in Season 2. Katori Hall, who created the series and runs it, directs both installments that drop on December 4. Everything after that arrives weekly on Fridays across the Starz app and the network’s streaming and on demand platforms.
The gap between seasons was not for lack of interest. Starz renewed the show in October 2022, two months after the second season wrapped. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes put production on hold, and filming did not get going until 2024. Season 2 averaged 11.6 million multiplatform viewers, which puts it among the strongest originals on the network.
Hall sent a letter to fans alongside the announcement, and she framed the ending as her own call. She wrote that every stripper eventually has to hang up her heels, and that seventeen years into the dance, that moment had arrived for her. She said the rarest honor a showrunner can have right now is ending a series on her own terms, which is why she chose to close the curtain with grace, grit and glitter rather than let it get taken from her. She thanked Starz for greenlighting the show and giving a platform to Black, queer and femme talent, and described the audience as a framily that carried the series through what she called perilous times.
Seventeen years is not an exaggeration on her part. Hall started writing the stage play that became this show back in 2009, building it out of research and conversations with more than forty dancers. The play, Pussy Valley, came first. The television version premiered in 2020.
Brandee Evans is back as Mercedes. So are Harriett D. Foy as Mayor Woodbine, Thomas Q. Jones as Mane, Psalms Salazar as Whisper, Morocco Omari as Big L, Dan J. Johnson as Corbin, Dominic DeVore as Duffy, Jordan M. Cox as Derrick, Bertram Williams Jr. as Woddy, Mea Wilkerson as Haiku, and Loretta Devine as Ernestine. Starz put out a first look teaser with the announcement, though a full trailer has not dropped yet.
Three seasons is short for a series with this kind of following, and the viewership numbers make the ending land strangely on paper. What Hall is describing is a decision made on her side rather than a cancellation handed down, and it comes with the whole of Season 3 to work with rather than a truncated final run.
The Pynk reopens December 4.
