Hulu’s Harlots is a show that bucks expectations. Frothy, heartfelt, and unapologetic about its subject matter, it’s a show about 18th century London sex workers that treats its subjects with respect and understanding, and not as window dressing. Now in its second season — the first two episodes of the new season are streaming today — Harlots has proven itself as one of the few shows on television to master feminist sex scenes. Every hook up serves a purpose in the story, and nudity is used sparingly, to a strategic extent. In Harlots, sex is all in a day’s work.

“We look at the show as a workplace drama,” showrunner and co-creator Moira Buffini told Decider. “This is work for the girls. Some days, you’d have a great day at work. Your job goes well. You really enjoy it. Other days, it’s an absolute grind. And some days, you can’t bear it any longer… And that’s what we try to portray: the normalness of their work.”

There many reasons why the sex scenes in Harlots are extraordinary: they’re not exploitative, they’re not moralistic, and they don’t ever let you forget the women involved are human beings. But how Harlots pulls this off is another story…

HARLOTS & THE POWER OF FEMALE VOICES

A huge part of Harlots’ success in tackling sex scenes comes down to putting the comfort of the actors first and foremost. While there are many scenes that use nudity to show the naked reality of sex work in the 1700s, there are almost as many tawdry scenes that happen without any nudity at all.

Buffini said, “It’s really, really important to us that our performers are comfortable. I think you can show a really characterful and dramatic sex scene without having two completely naked people. And also given that there’s so many sex scenes on our screens with naked women kind of as backdrop, we thought, ‘Well, let’s just use nudity. Let’s use male nudity. Let’s actually think about it.’ And we do and we’ve talked about it quite a lot.”

Ironically, there’s also a historic reason for the apparent prudishness. “Really, we’re historically backed up by the fact that the Georgians didn’t like to take their clothes off because it was really hard to get them all back on again. And it was bloody cold in Georgian houses!”

Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey, Black Mirror) plays Charlotte Wells, a popular courtesan, on Harlots. She told Decider that the knowledge she would have to partake in sex scenes was the thing that made her “most nervous” about accepting the role. Brown Findlay said that on previous projects, “apart from one experience where I was given more reign over my body,” she didn’t have the best of experiences.

“Things like nudity clauses, for example. Normally you go in with what you’d most like to do or not do, and then it’s kind of whittled down. Whereas [with Harlots], my agent went, ‘Well, okay, we’ll go with them on that,’ and they called me about five minutes later and ‘Yep, that’s totally accepted…That’s great. When can you rehearse?’” Brown Findlay said.

“I immediately was like, ‘Oh my gosh! They want me. Just, like, my work.’ And that felt like the most respectful thing that had ever happened to me as an actor.”

“We just have lots of really thoughtful conversations about when to use nudity,” Buffini said. “The directors have a lot of input, and [co-creator and showrunner] Alison Newman and I are very collaborative showrunners. We love working with them.”

Harlots is unique in that it’s one of the few shows on television with an all-female production team. That means that the showrunners, writers, producers, and directors are all women. (Men are on set, but they have diminished roles compared to other productions.) Brown Findlay said having all-female directors made a big difference and that the entire production team made sure the cast felt safe.

“You were able to be at work, and even if something had been pre-approved — that you were going to do x, y, or z — you could change your mind in the moment you were doing that,” Brown Findlay said. “Just how in real life, that should be your exact right.”

Harlots is one of two major shows in the last year that have tackled sex work in a new way — and with women behind the camera. The Deuce‘s pilot was directed by Michelle McLaren, is executive produced by star Maggie Gyllenhaal, and features a number of prominent female writers on its staff. Decider asked Buffini if it was necessary for women to tell stories about sex workers.

“I think men can write good stories about prostitutes, and they always have, but they write them from a male point of view. How can they help it? They are men,” Buffini said. “It feels high time that women told these stories and I really hope that we do justice to the women who work in the industry, both in the 18th century London and work in it now.”

HOW HARLOTS GETS REAL ABOUT SEX

Harlots is a show that brings a specific time period to life, and to wit, the production team has done its research. In fact, as Buffini told Decider ahead of Season 1, she and Newman were inspired by Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, which she described as “a sort of ‘London Guide to Whoring.'” The language, names, and characters of the book inspired the Harlots team’s entire approach.

In Season 2 of Harlots, we meet Cherry Dorrington (Francesca Miles), a scene-stealing harlot who happens to be a little person. Buffini said they got the idea for the character from Harris’s List itself. Cherry is a combination of two real historical sex workers who also happened to be little people: Jenny Dorrington and Cherry Cole. Similarly, one of the show’s most arresting characters, the tough dominatrix Nancy Birch (Kate Fleetwood), was also inspired by history. “There’s more than one dominatrix in Harris’s List!” Buffini said.

“And we thought, ‘What were their lives like?’ It’s really that act of the imagination,” Buffini said.

While Harris’s List might be full of colorful language, it doesn’t tell us a lot about the day-to-day lives of the women in its pages. Buffini said she and Newman had worked on previous projects about contemporary women who worked in the sex work industry, and that helped illuminate what life might be like.

When Brown Findlay conducted research for the role, she said that she was struck by “the quite terrifying parallels” between then and now. “For all the differences, and wild ways women were described in these books and magazines, the biggest thing that struck me was how little changed: how unsafe it still is to work in that industry. A lot of these women at the time were the most likely to die, the most likely to be murdered, to be abused,” she said.

Harlots doesn’t shy away from this darker side of the industry, either. In the first season, young Lucy Wells (Eloise Smyth) is repeatedly put in situations where she is abused, shamed, or threatened. “She’s got no choice. She’s got to be a harlot. And she’s always thought herself to be not very good at it. She hasn’t had a great start, it’s gone really horribly wrong,” Buffini said.

When Decider asked Buffini if it was intentional to depict most of Lucy’s bad experiences as not really being her fault, but that of her male clients, she said, “No, no, no, of course it is intentional! She shouldn’t be doing it in the first place! She’s a teenage girl. She should be at school!”

Then Buffini added: “But isn’t that what young women do? Blame themselves.”

WHY HARLOTS‘ SEX SCENES MATTER

The way Harlots is tackling sex and sex work is a remarkable shift from the norm. Sex workers are treated like three-dimensional human beings, and they get to have their own hopes, dreams, moods, and aspirations. Buffini told Decider that knowing that they were drawing inspiration from history compelled them to make sure they were doing a good job.

“When your characters have been real people with real lives, I think that gives you a moral imperative to imbue them with three dimensionality,” Buffini said.

Harlots isn’t just respecting sex workers, but its own cast of actresses. The inclusive production process — the one that listens to everyone’s needs and concerns — helps the cast do better work.

Brown Findlay said that the honesty on set made it easier to be “bolder” as an actor. “The more comfortable and safe someone feels, the more they’re able to strip everything back in terms of their acting and be vulnerable,” she said.

But as wonderful as the experience of working on Harlots has been for her, Brown Findlay felt it was all the more important for her younger co-stars. “This is their first thing they’ve done out of drama school. They’re having an experience that’s safe and they’re around other women who are voicing exactly what they think every moment that they think them. I think that teaches these young women coming through this industry that sometimes they are allowed to do that, and that’s okay,” she said.

Poignantly, Brown Findlay also noted that Harlots was treating its actors with respect “way before” the industry was rocked by an an avalanche of sexual abuse and harassment reports.

“That was really special,” Brown Findlay said. “They were leading by example long before anyone was looking.”

The first two episodes of Season 2 of Harlots debuted on Hulu today. New episodes will premiere every Wednesday.

Stream Harlots on Hulu