There is a moment midway through the first reason of FX's Pose that, more than any before or after it, sums up the show's purpose in the pop landscape. It's the late 1980s and New Jersey everyman Stan Bowes (Evan Peters) is sitting on the couch with his transgender girlfriend, Angel (Indya Moore), and asking her, earnestly, to take him to the balls she's always talking about: The events where she and her LGBTQ family, mostly people of color, strut in evening competitions to determine who can bring the most realness. "I mean, you know what my life is like," Stan says. "It's boring; it's stupid. Every movie, TV show, and magazine shows you what my life is like. The only chance I'm going to get of understanding your world is if you show me."

Pose, if nothing else, showed audiences the world of ball culture. Stan's statement might have been a case of subtext becoming text, but it's the kind of assertion characters have to make when they're on television shows that live in conversation with themselves and the world they're being broadcast to. Stan is his own character—a man who works for Donald Trump and whose marriage is unraveling after he falls for Angel—but he's also a stand-in for Pose's white, straight, cisgender audience, a group that (presumably) would like to know more about the New York ball scene but can't until they're shown. A group that is only just starting to realize how much TV reflects their lives and perspectives, rather than those of someone like Angel.

This is the trademark of a Ryan Murphy show—to provide visibility where it didn't exist before, to give hero's journeys to people who get them far too infrequently. Pose is fictional, but the world it represents is very real. Ball culture—the world of predominantly black and Latinx performers who lived and competed in crews, or "houses," for glory in ballroom pageants—has been a force in the queer community, and the world, for decades. But the ball scene's contributions have largely been sidelined. If people outside of the ball world know of its existence, it's likely because of Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris Is Burning, or maybe they're aware of voguing because of Madonna, or they've heard of shade and serving looks on RuPaul's Drag Race. But with the FX show, they get Blanca (Mj Rodriguez), an HIV-positive trans House Mother trying to protect her children—kids who were living on the street before she took them in—and build them into a crew that dominates the ball scene. She's strong and nurturing and with her every move is giving life to a story that has largely been discussed only in the abstract, if at all. She, like the best Murphy protagonists, is fierce and flawed, showing viewers what could be learned if the world listened to the people it's historically tried so hard to ignore.

"People, when they see this show, they can get a glimpse of lives that were lived," Rodriguez told Entertainment Weekly last year. "They can see that there were women who made it possible for us today to be up here, sitting here, being able to talk and being able to be in these positions now. That's what this show means: visibility and awareness and open-mindedness to understanding lives of people back in the day [enabling] us to be the storytellers to tell this story."

Pose is also Murphy's last show for Fox and its affiliated networks. After a string of successes that includes Nip/Tuck, Glee, and the American Horror Story and American Crime Story franchises, TV's reigning maximalist signed a deal (reportedly worth something like $300 million) with Netflix in February to bring his wares over to the streaming service. (He'll still oversee his ongoing series, though.) Late last week, that partnership started to bear fruit when Murphy announced, via Instagram, his series Hollywood, the first of presumably many the creator will incubate at the streaming service. (Two series he'd been working on before going to Netflix—The Politician and the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest prequel Ratched—will also land there but be produced by 20th Century Fox Television.) It's a show Murphy describes as "a love letter to the Golden Age of Tinseltown," meaning that it has potential to show early Hollywood as it actually was and that—if past is prologue—will launch a dialog as vast as any Murphy has started before, but at the rapid-fire pace of streaming.

The fact that Murphy announced his new series just two days before the Oscars is curious, if not exactly telling. He is nothing if not a hype-man for his own projects, and choosing to announce his first big Netflix production the day before Hollywood's biggest night, when all eyes are on the Dolby Theater, is strange, especially considering the series' subject matter. But it also could be a clue. This Oscars season was one in which issues of long-overdue representation (Black Panther), who gets to tell whose stories (Green Book), and the behind-the-scenes troubles of moviemaking (Bohemian Rhapsody) all showed that Hollywood is messy—and always has been.