Starz’s much lauded show The Girlfriend Experience (which was itself a sort of spin-off of Stephen Soderbergh’s film of the same name) will get a second season, but it’ll feature a whole new slew of faces and places.
In a press release and at their TCA presentation Monday, Starz announced that Soderbergh will again EP Season 2, and that Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz will continue to showrun, write and direct the show, which has been bumped up from 13 episodes to 14.
“We’re excited to offer STARZ subscribers a second season that will explore new GFEs, clients and relationships as we take viewers back into this world that questions the price of intimacy and its emotional consequences,” Carmi Zlotnik, managing director at Starz, said.
Though television critics loved The Girlfriend Experience, it was not received favorably by many sex workers, who considered Riley Keough’s almost sociopathically cold Christine a highly unrealistic depiction of what most women who work in the sex trade are like. It’ll be interesting to see what direction they take this fresh storyline; to research the first season, Seimetz and Kerrigan said they only spoke to women who enjoyed escorting. It stands to reason, then, that the show won’t suddenly switch its angle to feature a woman who doesn’t like the industry, but they’ll certainly have to go in some new direction to make sure they don’t tread over the same territory.