The members of the House of Evangelista are set to strut their way into the sunset this spring.
FX on Friday announced that “Pose,” Ryan Murphy’s history-making series set against the backdrop of New York’s ballroom scene of the 1980s and ’90s, will conclude this year. The show’s third season will debut May 2 and consist of seven episodes, with the finale set to air June 6.
Co-creator and executive producer Steven Canals spoke about the “very difficult” decision to end the series in a short video posted to Twitter early Friday.
“This has been an incredible journey and we have told the story that we wanted to tell, the way that we wanted to tell it,” he said. “I, along with my incredible collaborators, never intended on changing the television landscape. I simply wanted to tell an honest story about family, resilience and love.”
Murphy, who developed the series with Canals and Brad Falchuk, echoed those sentiments.
“We got to tell the exact story we wanted, as we wanted to tell it, and I’m incredibly honored and grateful,” he said in a tweeted statement.
The news appeared to come as a surprise to many fans.
The road to Season 3 was a rocky one. In April of last year, Canals said he and the “Pose” cast had wrapped filming on the season’s premiere just as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down much of society ― including the show’s production. By October, production had resumed, as evidenced by a photo posted to Instagram by Janet Mock, one of the show’s writers and directors.
When “Pose” premiered in 2018, it featured television’s largest cast of transgender actors in series regular roles and the largest LGBTQ cast for a scripted series.
The show brought fame to many of its trans performers, including Angelica Ross ― who has since appeared on “American Horror Story” ― and MJ Rodriguez. In 2019, Billy Porter became the first gay Black man to win an Emmy for lead actor in a drama for his portrayal of Pray Tell, a designer and ballroom emcee.
In 2019, Canals told The Hollywood Reporter that he’d pitched “Pose” as a five-season series, but stressed that “it could be more or less.”
“What’s really important for all of us” is to tell the story “that we intended to tell,” he said at the time. “Once we’ve hit that point, we’ll know that it’s time to end it.”