'Pose' Boss Reveals Why the Series Is Ending With Season 3

Pose is coming to an end and now the team behind the show is opening up about it’s final season.

In a virtual discussion on Monday (April 16), showrunner Steven Canals and the cast discussed the series’ end and the stories they hope to tell in the last seven episodes, per Variety.

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In the final season of the show, the year is 1994 and ballroom is a “distant memory” for Blanca (Mj Rodriguez), who is struggling “to balance being a mother with being a present partner to her new love, and her latest role as a nurse’s aide.”

Elsewhere, ballroom emcee Pray Tell (Billy Porter) is dealing with “unexpected health burdens” while, in the ballroom scene, a “vicious new upstart house forces the House of Evangelista members to contend with their legacy.”

“If you watch this season, and more specifically the finale, that was what it was always intended to be,” Steven said. “If you go back to the first season, everything was a set up for this final chapter. Stories have a beginning, middle and an end, and this final season was the end of this three-arc narrative that we’ve been telling.”

He continued, “It’s us finally allowing our characters to explore what it means to have all of the things that they very clearly stated in the first season that they wanted.”

Billy Porter added that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a very challenging time, but that it ultimately reflects the Pose‘s portrayal of resilience.

“I have been dealing with a lot of PTSD during this COVID time. It’s very reminiscent of what it was like then,” he explained, recalling the HIV/AIDS crisis of decades prior that the show depicts. “The best news about that is that I survived, we got through it and there is another side to it — we can get to the other side. And I feel like that’s what Pose really accomplishes this season: reminding the public that it’s when we come together and when we lead with love [that] we get to the other side.”

Steven Canals also said of the show’s ending, “For me as a true lover of television, one of the things that has always frustrated me is when I am tuning into a season of television and I can tell this season just feels like filler. The last thing I wanted to do to our audience was create narrative simply to create narrative, and with no real intention. I could see the ending … and it made sense to land the plane comfortably, if you will.”

Check out the trailer for Pose‘s final season here.