‘Three Women’ boss reflects on the powerful limited series

Warning: This article contains spoilers for theThree Women finale, titled “Her Name.”

With one final look of hope from Maggie (Gabrielle Creevy), Three Women has come to an end.

The adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s bestseller follows Sloane (DeWanda Wise), Lina (Betty Gilpin), and Maggie as author Gia (Shailene Woodley) tells their stories. The result is a fearless deep dive into women’s sexuality with a series that doesn’t shy away from just about any experience — good or bad.

“A real guiding light for us was to show women in all of their complexity and in the hope that women would see parts of themselves, but also see things that are not like them and still empathize,” showrunner Laura Eason tells Entertainment Weekly. “We were both trying to have women feel not alone in the things that they want… and feel emboldened by watching these stories to be more authentically themselves.”

One particularly powerful scene from the show’s run involves Woodley’s Gia experiencing a miscarriage on a bathroom floor. “Speaking as someone who has had a miscarriage alone on a bathroom floor, I’m so glad it isn’t being dramatized as, ‘Oh no, I have a cramp and now it’s over and I’m looking sadly out a window,'” Eason says of the decision to really stay in that moment with that character for minutes. “It felt super important to us to honor these experiences of women that often get shortcut or skipped over and really sit in them and experience them in a deep way.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

That scene is just one of the reasons why Eason is proud of the series, including the fact that it’s also funny and sexy and, like women, so many different things. “You can talk about these stories as something that is good for you, like spinach or homework, but we wanted to make something that people loved watching and had an amazing experience watching in the same way that the book is very deep and very rich but people loved it,” she says.

The series also got to add something new to Taddeo’s story — a bit of reflection. In the finale, Gia is able to talk about what she is taking away from writing the book. “The summation is not as explicit in the book in terms of what [Gia] learned because obviously the response to the book was not part of the book,” Eason says. “So we were able to include some of the response in the framing of the ending, which included Gia being able to talk a bit about what she learned and the experience of meeting these three real women.”

Although it’s unclear if the show was originally going to be a limited series or if there had been conversations about future seasons, for now, it looks like the story has come to an end. “All I can say now is Starz has programmed it as a limited [series],” Eason says. “And I’m just so thrilled that we got to make the season that we did.”

You can stream Three Women on the Starz app.