If the most experience you’ve had with a strip club is watching (then re-watching) Hustlers, you’re not alone. While strip clubs have been around since the dawn of time (right?), they remain a workplace that’s shrouded in mystery, and it remains oddly taboo to openly talk about being a stripper — even while Jennifer Lopez gets award nominations for Hustlers (which, by the way, made over $100 million) and pole dancing classes become a mainstay of high-end workout studios. Clearly, people want to know about the inner lives of strippers and how they do what they do. And we’ve rounded up TV shows that give you a way better look than any Hollywood movie or pole dancing routine ever will.

With new drama P-Valley debuting on Starz on July 12, there’s more interest than ever in how these long-ignored dancers make a living: how they get into the business, how they learn to make money doing it, and what they’ve learned along the way. While P-Valley offers a high-drama scripted version of the strippers’ experience down South, the business of strip clubs knows no borders — TV documentary Strippers features strippers in big-city Scotland, while reality shows Naked Hustle and Beyond the Pole focus on the lives of strippers in Atlanta, Georgia.

These reality shows paint a clear picture of the struggles strippers continue to face. Their job is physically and emotionally demanding, requires constant interaction and is entirely dependent on the customer, and is often demeaned and looked down on by those outside the strip club environment. Strippers talk about how their job affects everything from their relationships to their physical health — and many share how different they thought stripping would be before they started.

Curious to hear more about the inner world of strip clubs? These TV shows give us the best look at strippers’ lives up close.

Starz’ new drama P-Valley tells the story of strippers working in the Mississippi Delta, AKA the Dirty Delta. This show gets right down to business and pulls no punches about these characters’ lives.

Netflix’s 2018 documentary Strippers followed the lives of strippers in Edinburgh, Glasglow, and Aberdeen: where they work, where they live, and how they got to be where they are.

Watch here.

The 2018 UMC documentary series Naked Hustle took a look at where strip club culture and hip hop culture intersect, hearing from DJs, dancers, patrons, and more to hear about what life inside these clubs is really like.

This 2013 documentary series follows male strippers from Las Vegas, Niagara Falls, and Montreal and gets the inside details from each one on what makes their stripping experience unique, and the ins and outs of what it feels like to do their job.

This 2000 HBO documentary zeroed in on one strip club in particular, featuring the lives of strippers working in a Pennsylvania gentlemen’s club. 

This documentary follows male stripping troupe The Dreamboys as they practice, put on shows, and open up about their personal lives behind the troupe.

Watch here.

E!’s special Men of the Strip follows the men who perform in this strip show as they test out new members, look for permanent Vegas employment, and nail down their singing and dancing routines.

Watch teaser here.

This reality series looks at six Atlanta strippers who are trying to build lives beyond the pole and get their businesses off the ground.