Harlots EP talks new additions and big changes in the season 3 premiere

Harlots co-creator Moira Buffini chatted with Culturess about the series’ season 3 premiere, what sort of stories she’s hoping to tell, and the addition of an LGBTQ brothel to the show.

Harlots, the fierce, feminist and utterly compelling period drama focused on sex workers in 18th century London, returned to streaming service Hulu this week for its third season.

The season 3 premiere reorders the series’ premise in new and fascinating ways, elevating the younger generation of harlots into more prominent roles in the wake of Margaret Wells’ transportation to America and adding several new sets of characters, including a pair of brothers who are also male pimps, and a bawd who aims to run a brothel targeted at homosexual men.

The world of Harlots has never felt quite so rich and diverse before, and it’s exciting to think about where the show might go this season. Can Charlotte successfully manage the transition from harlot to bawd? What will Lucy’s life look like now that she’s free to make her own choices at last? How is Lydia Quigley surviving in the notorious Bedlam Hospital? And what has become of her son and her former girls?

We had the chance to ask Harlots co-creator and Executive Producer Moira Buffini about the season 3 premiere and the big changes affecting all our favorites.

“These women live such precarious lives,” Buffini explained, when asked about the changes between seasons 2 and 3. “Harlots are the most socially mobile of all the people in their society. Their fortunes rise and fall dramatically.”

And given that a year has passed since the season 2 finale, well, that leaves a lot of room for mobility – of both the upward and downward varieties.  But the fluid nature of the time period – and the generally unstable situation facing many of the women of Harlots — means that lots of things can change, and very quickly.

“Lydia Quigley starts the series locked in the squalor of Bedlam and Lucy Wells is riding high on her fame. No one stays where they are for long.”

“As always, we feel they are dancing on the edge of an abyss,” Buffini explained.

It’s doubtful many of us expect Lydia to spend the entirety of season 3 in the asylum, though it’s still deeply disturbing to see the squalor and suffering this formerly powerful figure is now forced to endure on a daily basis. But the question of Lucy is a more interesting one, given that she spent so much of last season on such a downward spiral into darkness.

Her apparent desire to leave the life of a working girl behind makes a lot of sense when considered in light of the violence she was repeatedly subjected to as a harlot, and perhaps that’s made the idea of owning a molly house – staffed and patronized by men with little interest in her, sexually speaking – more appealing.

The introduction of a molly house in season 3 is an interesting decision, but one that seems to have been brewing for some time.

“We loved the character of Rasselas (played by Joseph Altin) in seasons 1 and 2. These boys were harlots too,” Buffini said.

“But we hadn’t found a way to tell their story with women at the center until we came up with the character of molly house ‘mother’ Elizabeth Harvey and her business venture with Lucy Wells.”

The Harlots creative team’s dedication to always centering on female stories is admirable and honestly a lesson that pretty much every show out there would do well to emulate.

Because as a result, the addition of these new characters – as well as the two male pimps running a neighborhood tavern brothel – makes sense within the larger world of the show’s story, and integrates these new faces in with those we already know well.

Where will their stories go from here? Well, that’s something we’ll have to tune in to the rest of the season to find out.

New episodes of Harlots stream Wednesdays on Hulu.