Pose creator Steven Canals explains why the beloved show had to come to an end
Hailie Sahar as Lulu, Indya Moore as Angel. (Michael Parmelee/FX)
Pose creator Steven Canals has opened up about why the show had to end, saying he had always envisioned a “very specific ending”.
The groundbreaking drama returns this weekend, with fans already mourning what feels like a premature ending.
News that Pose’s new season would be the last caught many unaware, but Canals has explained that he and executive producer Ryan Murphy always had a “very specific ending in mind”.
Pose season three and the “story that we tell in the finale” is “what it was always intended to be”, Canals said. He added there are a lot of “incredible experiences” that the series’ writers knew they wanted “all of our characters to have” from the very start of the show.
“And if you go back to the first season, everything [season three] was a set-up for this final chapter,” Canals said. “Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And this final season was the end of this three-arc – this three-act, rather, narrative that we’ve been telling.”
He said “every choice” throughout Pose‘s history was “intentional” and was “leading up to the story that we tell” in the final season. By reaching this point in the Pose saga, he said it was allowing the “characters to explore what it means to have all of the things they very clearly stated in the first season that they wanted”.
Steven Canals attends the FX’s “Pose” Season 3 New York Premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on 29 April 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
Canals explained: “So now this final season is an exploration into, once you’ve accomplished the dream, is it everything that you wanted? Is it everything that you wished it would be? Is it quite as shiny as you imagined it to be?”
He said, “as a true lover of television”, that one of the things that always “frustrated” him is “when I am tuning into a season of television”, and he could tell the season “just feels like filler”. Canals said the “last thing” he wanted to do to Pose fans was to “create narrative simply for the sake of creative narrative with no real intention”.
Pose season three premieres on Sunday (2 May).
