It's finally time to catch up with sisters Lyn and Emma. In just one season of Vida, they endured a roller coaster of emotions and life-altering events while coming to terms with how their mother lived hers. Season 2 premiered on May 23 and is available to watch in full in the Starz app right this very minute. Hopefully, a Vida Season 3 will follow, but the network has not yet confirmed its renewal.
Fear not, though. There is hope that creator Tanya Saracho's long term deal with Starz — which she signed the February preceding the show's premiere, per The Hollywood Reporter — will provide the Season 3 fans are looking for.
In Season 1, after mourning their mother's passing and interrupting their years-long separate lives to attend her funeral, the sisters unexpectedly meet their mother's wife they didn't know she had. What they thought would be a quick visit to sell their mom's bar and building and return to their regular lives suddenly becomes their new normal.
Season 2 has been highly anticipated ever since Season 1 wrapped, considering viewers gave it a certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes review of 100 percent, which is justified in more ways than one. Saracho created the show to introduce the long-overdue queer Latinx perspective to TV, and has done so by filling her writers room and directorial staff with those people.
“We don’t have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film of brown queers,” she told IndieWire. “Latina queers, I can’t think of that many. Orange is the New Black, but front and center we don’t. We have a lot of queerness on the show but I’d say we’re not a queer show. The creator is queer so it’s going to be in there. And my queerness informs how Emma sees herself. As we keep exploring, we’re going to source myself a lot.”
But she's not just sourcing herself. As the show's creator, she's taking advantage of the opportunity to give other women writers, specifically women writers of color, their big breaks.
“At Shondaland six out of nine writers were of color, not Latinx, but I was like, wait, I can do that but for the whole room? Atlanta had done that, then I can do that,” Saracho said of working with the network. “That was not an argument for Starz… and not just the staffing of my writers room, which was all Latinx, for my cinematographer that was the first time she had run a unit. The argument was you took a chance on me, take a chance on her. All those things and the story things, they trusted.”
And it's because of those intentional decisions made by Saracho and her team that Vida has become the whole and rich watch it is. It addresses and prevents erasure of marginalized communities directly and indirectly, on and off-screen. There's queer sex, candid Spanish conversation (no subtitles necessary), and the series is led entirely by women.
In March, Deadline reported that Hispanic-household viewership of Vida "nearly tripled since its premiere on Sunday, May 6, 2018, growing by 171 percent to earn the series the largest Hispanic audience composition for premium series in 2018." Audience grew by 60 percent on the network app throughout Season 1 as well. The proof is in the statistics — viewers want more shows like Vida. So why not give it a Season 3?
