Shas renewed its hit Latinx-centered series, Vida, for a third season. The news came just days after Vida’s Season 2 premiere on May 23, which picks up the story of two Latina sisters struggling to keep their mother’s old Boyle Heights bar open after her untimely death.
The show made headlines in its debut season as the first television series to feature an “all-Latinx” writers room. As a show written ‘by and for’ a Latinx audience, Vida’s signature themes include generational family secrets, ruthless gentrification versus earnest ‘gentefication,’ LGBT and queer representation, and sex.
Lots of great, graphic sex.
From NBC’s Cristela (2015) and Fox’s Bordertown (2016) to Netflix’s One Day at a Time (2017) and CW’s Jane the Virgin (2014), so many beloved Latin-centered television shows have been cancelled in recent years. But there’s life. We can count Vida among a crop of new shows that feature Latin actors and stories, such as Netflix’s Mr. Iglesias and the new Party of Five reboot. For these shows to last, however, audiences must tune in—and not just “Latinx” folks. Vida fans already know to support the series, but why should new audiences tune in to a show about a queer Mexican American family fighting each other and the gentrifying forces in their millennial East L.A. neighborhood?