With "Senorita Mambo," we'll be a little more than halfway through this season of Hap and Leonard, which has been a scathing portrayal of small-town racial tensions. And yet, the show always balances that darkness with light and humor and quirkiness so that things never become too bleak. Still, what happened to the brilliant and glamorous Florida (Tiffany Mack)? Hope seems hard at this point.
In the fourth episode of the season, the show pivots away from what Hap (James Purefoy) and Leonard (Michael K. Williams) have been experiencing to go back and tell Florida's story in Grovetown, framed by a new important clue they discover. As EP John Wirth told us in a recent interview,
"It was very important to always keep Florida present in the story. In those first episodes, 'it happens through Hap’s obsessive fantasies and dreaming about her. We didn’t want to show the traditional, overused Klan images of hoods and crosses and all that, in the real world, because we felt like it’d been overused [but] we decided to overuse it again in our fantasy worlds. So Hap has a series of dreams where he’s imagining what’s happened to Florida, and we see that all the way through. And then in the fourth episode, we just decided to stop, and tell the story of what happened to her when she got to Grovetown, and what she experienced.'"
In our exclusive clip, we see Florida talking with Andrew Dice Clay's Sonny Knox, and proving that she is a force to be reckoned with (and is he a suspect?):
Hap and Leonard airs Wednesday nights on SundanceTV. For more of the series, check out these stories below:
- ‘Hap and Leonard: The Two-Bear Mambo’ Review: The Devil Went Down to Texas
- ‘Hap and Leonard’ Season 3 Cast on Race, Male Friendships, & a Timely “Two-Bear Mambo”
- Michael K. Williams on ‘Hap and Leonard’, His Candid Friendship with James Purefoy, and ‘The Night Of’
