Series Info:
Ryan Murphy’s queer musical-dance series Pose is a TV event so unprecedented that any attempt to compare it to other series or films falls apart fast. Though the FX series sometimes has trouble balancing earnest kitchen-sink drama with the otherworldly flamboyance of its ’80s New York ballroom scenes and the innately didactic quality of some of its main characters’ arguments and moments of crisis, the totality hangs together quite well. Maybe that’s because Murphy and his regular collaborators (including series co-creators Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals) are working for a network that has already staged so many of their hybrid series (including Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, and American Crime Story) that viewers have learned to expect the unexpected and give the creators time to either find a vibe or implode in glorious, scatterbrained overreach.
The pilot episode, which debuted Sunday, sets the major players in motion: Blanca (MJ Rodriguez), a wannabe leader withering in the shadow of the imperious Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson), breaks free and starts her own house as Mother of the Evangelistas, recruiting fresh blood that includes Damon Richards (Ryan Jamaal Swain), a black cis queer teen from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who is only starting to redefine himself in the big city. The rivalry between Blanca and Elektra proves as grandly melodramatic as the conflict in a Shakespearean tragedy or an old-school gangster picture about warring New York tribes, particularly when Elektra holds forth, hectoring her charges and verbally pummeling Blanca with the zeal of George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (a classic tale of an older woman panicking at the prospect of generational obsolescence). The Blanca-Elektra war serves as an adamantine backbone for all the subplots to come, including Damon’s struggle to create his own identity after being rejected by his homophobic parents, and the relationship between Angel (Indya Moore) and her white cis male lover Stan Bowes (Murphy regular Evan Peters), a rising executive in the Trump organization. At the same time, Pose still makes space for grandly entertaining sequences, like the museum heist that yields the period finery that powers Elektra’s family toward victory in a royalty-themed ball in the first episode.
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