P-Valley’s pilot episode opens in the aftermath of a hurricane, where we meet Autumn Night (who goes by a few other names too) fishing a stranger’s suitcase out of the murky water. She snatches the ID inside, along with a new identity. We learn through flashbacks that the disaster she fled is more manmade than natural, and she left a lot more behind than soggy furniture or black mold. After a bus ride to the fictional town of Chucalissa, Mississippi, Autumn wins an amateur night “booty battle” at a local shake joint called The Pynk, and finds a prickly, new family of sorts among the strippers on staff.

Watch it for the gritty, pre-Disney Times Square of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the location’s go-go boot-bedecked denizens, and a layered look at how cultural shifts shaped the evolution of anti-obscenity law, paving the way for the skin flick industry to flourish.

A disturbing, but delicious ‘80s flashback featuring shiny fashion and big hair, a Season 2 nod to Richard Simmons, and an honest and nuanced look at the psychosocial forces that feed an eating disorder.

Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) is a frustrated housewife who relies on heavy doses of ballet and bulimia to dull the blades of an especially ‘80s SoCal spin on the Feminine Mystique. When ballet class is canceled, she finds salvation in the newborn aerobics craze, but success is not easy.

“Two, four, six, eight, don’t come here to masturbate!” sounds like something the Moral Majority chanted back in the Eighties outside a porn palace, but the slogan was our battle cry for fair treatment on the job. We had formed a picket line outside the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco nude theater that employed us as dancers, to demand better working conditions and to organize the nation’s first successful strippers’ union.