Naturally, Pose has all the hallmarks of a Ryan Murphy endeavor: spice, shock, and a taste for maximalism.
Naturally, Pose has all the hallmarks of a Murphy endeavor: spice, shock, and a taste for maximalism. His are characters hemmed in by storms with racial and emotional intensities, people who eventually wash ashore and fight to make a way home. There's Angel (Indya Moore), whose arc is particularly engrossing for the way it tangles desire and love into a counter image of traditional beauty: a trans Latin woman is fashioned into a patriarchal ideal. For all her venom, Elektra is also rendered with humanness. "I don't feel incomplete, I just feel inconvenienced," she confesses to a ball performer about wanting to get gender confirmation surgery, despite the misgivings of her rich benefactor. "I'm tired of living in this in-between for him." Murphy's 1980s metropolis has themes aplenty—nightlife segregation, body abjection, the thrall of the AIDS epidemic—and he does his very best to juggle them with care and vibrancy. In other words, Pose is a gaudy statement piece with more than enough heart to go around.
These days we talk a good deal about Prestige TV, but maybe what we should be talking about is Resistance TV—shows that buck not just traditional narratives about race, gender, and class, just as Pose does, but ones that employ those same marginalized communities behind the camera, in the writers rooms, and in executive suites. Canals, who identifies as a cisgender Afro-Latinx queer man, and Murphy have applied that mood in full to their show. According to Murphy, Pose employed 108 trans cast and crew members, 31 LGBTQ characters, and a number of trans directors. Janet Mock, a trans author and activist, worked in the writers room and wrote what will likely be one of the season's most talked about episodes ("The Fever"). "It's television as advocacy," Murphy told The New Yorker in May.
Still, Pose is not the first look inside ballroom culture. A more recent snippet came during the season one finale of Baz Luhrmann's short-lived Netflix series The Get Down. Dizzie (Jaden Smith) visits an undisclosed ball in SoHo and stumbles into a world of wonder and revelry. "What is this place?" he asks, and is met with a response that's all the more savory because of the liberty laced in its truth: "It's where the free people are free."
Under sumptuous, champagne lighting, the theatre of self-invention became a thing of regal, wanted beauty. "A ball is the very word—whatever you want to be, you be," one attendee affirms in Livingston's doc. "At a ball, you have the chance to display your arrogance, your seductiveness, your beauty, your wit, your charm. You can become anything and do anything—right here, right now."
Though balls continued, their relevance in the mainstream never truly caught on, relegated to oral histories and academic texts. Viceland's recent docu-series My House picks up where Livingston concluded—offering viewers an intimate snapshot of contemporary NYC ball life. In its debut from April, top competitor Tati 007, a Latina with long blond hair like Rapunzel, is without a House and looking to make a stamp at the high-stakes Coldest Winter Ever Ball. "Every time I walk I bring some drama to the floor,"she says as footage of her performance overtakes the screen—her weave whipping the air in two, her sharp, sudden movements summoning the richness and power of voguing.