As they reckon with Vidalia’s den of secrets and the future of the dive bar she left behind, they cross paths with characters such as Mari — “La Pinche Chinche” — a young Chicana activist fighting gentrification in Boyle Heights. The first episode of the show, created by playwright-turned-screenwriter Tanya Saracho, starts as Mari tightens a black bandanna around her hair and adjusts her dark blue lipstick, like a soldier preparing for battle, and records a defiant, expletive-filled video declaration of her commitment to her community.

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“This is a manifesto, mi gente, so grab a pencil and take note,” she growls. She’s confrontational, pugnacious and fiercely independent. Then her father interrupts her impassioned rallying cry. In Spanish, he orders her to cook him some eggs. She sighs, turns the video off, and obliges.

“None of these characters are perfect,” Saracho, 42, explained recently, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “They’re actually complicated and feas — they’re ugly sometimes. But that’s a radical thing we can do, to put [out] complicated versions of ourselves that don’t appease the dominant culture. Instead, you look at them in their realness.”

When “Vida’ premiered in 2018, it scored a 100 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics lauded Saracho and her predominantly queer, female and Latinx writers for creating idiosyncratic personalities that pushed themes of gentrification and displacement, misogyny and homophobia in Latinx culture, LGBTQ acceptance and strained familial duties. The second season, which earned a GLAAD award for outstanding comedy series, highlighted Saracho’s talent for subverting audience expectations and balancing the glossy, often-explicit high drama of cable TV with nuanced storytelling. But the team’s hardest task came this year, when it had to write an end for the characters it had poured so much into.

Last year, Saracho got a call from a Starz executive who wanted to discuss the third season of “Vida,” which premieres Sunday, being its last. “I’d started feeling dread because we were waiting so long,” Saracho said. “And then I get the phone call from a person [at Starz] that I really respect and love, and he was like, ‘Prepare yourself.’ ”

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The news wasn’t totally out of left field: According to Nielsen, the second season of the show averaged 198,000 viewers per episode. Despite the committed fan base and critical acclaim, it wasn’t enough to keep the show going. In an email, Jeffrey Hirsch, president and CEO of Starz, said, “While like all good things, ‘Vida’ too must come to an end, we are grateful to Tanya and the entire cast and crew for three beautifully crafted seasons and look forward to audiences continuing to discover the show this season and beyond.”

The decision came at a time when Latinx roles on streaming services barely register above 7 percent — and audiences had seen a similar move last year, when Netflix pulled the plug on its Latinx-led remake of “One Day at a Time.” ViacomCBS’s Pop TV eventually stepped in, picked the comedy up and charging it back to life. However, because “One Day at a Time” is produced by Sony Pictures Television, separate from Netflix, it was possible to shop the program around. Starz doubles as the production studio and the network for “Vida,” so to Saracho, its fate was definitive.

“I had to just say goodbye,” Saracho said. She threw herself into the work, and it wasn’t until she wrote a goodbye letter to fans a few weeks ago — and as she at alone, sheltering in place while the final season premiere approached — that the weight of ending “Vida” fully struck.

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“Honestly, I put my whole spirit, my whole — I’m going to cry!” she trails off for a moment. “I put my everything into this, so it’s very emotional. But I’m also proud of it.”

Saracho kept her feelings at bay for most of the four-month shoot. But the cast seized their final moments together and went through a full spectrum of emotions. (“I was bawling like an ugly baby!” said Ser Anzoategui, who plays Eddy.) “Vida” was a breakthrough for nearly all of them: Melissa Barrera, who plays Lyn, had mostly worked in Spanish-language telenovelas. Mishel Prada had done only a few commercials and a Web series before getting the role of Emma. And Anzoategui, a non-binary actor who uses they/their pronouns, came from theater.

Anzoategui, whose aching performance is considered one of the show’s best, said “Vida” provided visibility and a platform. “People that would never talk to me are like, ‘Oh my God — Eddy!’ ” they said, adding that they have written their own plays and op-eds about non-binary experiences. “What an entry point, you know, to be able to have that normalcy in my representation.”

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Part of what Saracho sees as “the magic of the show” is how it has “opened all of these doors to new voices and new artists.” She noted that cinematographer Carmen Cabana, who had never run a camera department before “Vida,” recently took on Hulu’s “High Fidelity.”

Barrera added that the show’s critical acclaim “helps us get in rooms that we couldn’t before.” Now, she’s starring in Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights.”

“Vida” also stands apart, especially from its more family-friendly contemporaries such as “One Day at a Time” and “Gentefied,” because of its direct, no-holds-barred approach to sex, nudity and intimacy. Saracho said that even the most explicit moments — and there are several, including an orgy in Season 2 — moved the character arcs forward. Emma learns to trust another person enough that she’s willing to lounge in a bathtub with them. In another scene, viewers see Eddy weeping fully naked and exposed — something that reflected the writers’ desire to get many different body types on screen.

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“I don’t know if there’s going to be another show that’ll be so inclusive,” Anzoategui said.

But Prada said “Vida” has given the industry new portrayals and will inspire people to take chances on characters like the ones it championed. “I feel like Melissa and myself, we don’t look that different from Latinas that you’ve already seen,” Prada said. “What I get really excited about is that now in the archetype of the world, there’s a Pinche Chinche, there’s an Eddy. You can look to them as you’re pitching a show and say, ‘Oh, they’re kind of like Eddy from Vida.’ ”

While many celebrated the depictions of queer sex and body inclusivity, “Vida” left some hoping for more. Boyle Heights activists protested near Saracho’s sets, saying she had exploited anti-gentrification struggles and glibly portrayed activists. Others pointed out that the main cast does not include black or Afro-Latinx actors. Saracho, who has started work on an Afro-Latinx show called “Brujas,” said she wants to support more creators to ensure varied experiences are greenlighted. “I think it’s time to demand that our multifaceted, complicated, not always super-friendly story gets told,” she said.

She added that she and the writers had a huge list of other ideas they wanted to touch on but ultimately couldn’t get to everything. Still, they packed tons into the final season. So much happens — a gender-queer quince­añera, a performance by a real-life drag-king crew, an adult baptism, a tragic death — that a neat conclusion seems almost impossible. And in fact, the story’s final moments evaded Saracho for weeks. She avoided writing the very last scene, even when she had to pitch it to the network.

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“They were like, ‘So, what happens?’ And I was like, ‘Don’t make me decide yet,’ ” she said. “I put a blank slide into my PowerPoint that just said, ‘You’ll see.’ ”

The closing shots came to her when she was listening to “Luna Lovers” by the East Los Angeles band Las Cafeteras, a song that she said “kind of unraveled” the entire show for her. It brought her back to the relationship between the two sisters and revealed the show’s larger message. “It was always a love story between the two of them,” she said.

Prada doesn’t mind revisiting Emma every now and then and wondering what she might be up to. “In our hearts, the characters continue on — nothing’s really an end, it’s all a transition,” she said. She envisions Emma opening herself up to relationships she found over three seasons. “She gets an opportunity to be more present . . . and I’d like to think she gives it a shot.”

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But imagining the characters existing beyond the final credits is much harder for Saracho. Asked to play with the idea of where they might be and what they might be doing, she was again overcome with emotion.