Producer Steven Soderbergh, who also directed the movie of which the show is inspired, wanted to approach the making of the show as a creative experiment, so he proposed a male/female filmmaker duo which hadn't worked together before, in this case Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, to write and direct season 1. Both Kerrigan and Seimetz talked later about the difficulty of the experience, so it wasn't a surprise when season 2 presented a two-story structure where said stories were completely independent, each one written and directed by the directors on their own. For season 3, however, which was greenlit a year and a half after the finale of season 2, Soderbergh seemed to have forgone the experiment approach, because he just hired Anja Marquardt to do 10 episodes.
The first season is actually based in Chicago, not New York. The movie this series is based on, The Girlfriend Experience (2009), was set in New York.
Season 2 is set in Washington DC and New Mexico - across 2 parallel story-lines.
Season 3 is set in London.
Although the characters are different, Season 1 protagonist Christine Reade has the same first name and alias "Chelsea", as Christine in The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Riley Keough's first career nude scenes. She strips naked and has a lot of sex on the show, but she says she's fine with that and knew it would be required when she accepted the role. During an interview at the Sundance Film Festival before the show premiered, she said, "I know that there's going to be sex in it, it just kind of comes with it. I was expecting all of that. What's cool about it is when you're watching it, it really weirds you out. It gets weird reactions because there was no lighting [and] it's super naturalistic so it's very uncomfortable. It's like spying on this girl doing the weird stuff." When asked if her husband, stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, minded her rolling around in bed naked with other men, she said it didn't bother him at all. "He's fine. You know, he works in film as well so he understands how it works and it's part of the job. He watched the whole season, he's very cool. We're like very progressive. He doesn't care about that kind of stuff."
Anna Friel was 17 when she appeared in the series in 1994 as schoolgirl Beth Jordache and had her first onscreen lesbian kiss. She said in a 2017 interview that she had no concept of how that kiss would change her life. Overnight she became an object of desire for both men and women and for a very long time she was defined by that kiss, but she didn't want to be. She spent years turning down other lesbian roles because it felt like going back to Beth. But it did make her want to take on parts that showed extreme sides of women, focusing on difficult, dangerous and damaged characters. She finally agreed to play a lesbian again in 2017 in this series.