“Pose” (airing Sundays, on FX) is set in New York City, in the late nineteen-eighties, amid the ballroom culture immortalized by the documentary “Paris Is Burning.” To walk in a ball is to work it. Vying to sashay into renown by earning high scores from judges, competitors—all of them queer or trans, and black or brown—stalk the floor in regalia geared to suit a given challenge. The regular m.c. of the balls within “Pose,” named Pray Tell and delightfully played by Billy Porter, summons participants to flaunt a specific type of fabulousness at least a couple of times each episode. “The category is bring it like royalty,” Pray Tell says. “The category is stone-cold face,” he says. “The category is high-fashion evening wear,” he says, with a preacherly bellow.

The series is likewise emphatic in announcing its themes. Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals, “Pose” comes billed as a dance musical and plays like a social melodrama, thickly packed with incident and lightly spiced with MTV expressionism. Our truehearted heroine, Blanca (MJ Rodriguez), serves a lot of upstart sass when wearing a raspberry-pink one-shoulder gown to walk against her former mentor and eternal archrival, Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson). In the first of the four episodes available for review, Blanca defects from Elektra’s ballroom crew. Blanca, motivated to strike out on her own after testing positive for H.I.V., rents an apartment and founds a “house,” offering herself as the “mother” to a family of choice. In this capacity, Blanca proves tough-loving and ever selfless, exhibiting a steady resilience, which makes her an extremely warm presence, and a saintly perfection, which makes her a mildly annoying character in the context of a series that soppily offers a very special holiday episode, complete with the music of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” in its third week.

Blanca begins building her dynasty by taking in Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), a seventeen-year-old thrown out of his homophobic home in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Blanca rescues the boy from a bench in a Washington Square Park that, despite hosting junkies and thieves, seems anachronistically well-kept, in keeping with “Pose” ’s backlot vision of Manhattan. Despite the plot’s careful, sometimes affecting attention to disease and desperation, the series is, visually, no grittier than “Felicity.”

Blanca nurtures Damon toward gaining his place in élite culture as a dance student at the New School and toward conquering the underground at the balls. Early on, she leads him down to the waterfront—to the piers that were a hub of gay life and an instantiation of its marginality—where an invigorating gladiatorial display of voguing is all too briefly under way. “Voguing doesn’t just happen at the balls,” Blanca says. “It lives in the streets, too.” Damon has an astute follow-up question: “Oh, so it’s like break dancing?” Blanca proceeds, “Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s a statement: I wanna have a name in this world.” It would be news to the Rock Steady Crew that break dancing was not, in its way, a practice of existential assertion; each art form enabled its practitioners to inhabit space with a freedom elsewhere unavailable. No need to dis. But the lines are typical of the show’s rigorous didacticism. Later, when a crusading Blanca stages a one-person sit-in at a gay bar that does not serve transgender patrons, it feels less like a moment organic to that particular character’s life in 1987 than an intersectional lesson in the struggle specifically designed for the class of 2018.

“Pose” vividly manifests special problems in period drama when inventing a professional life for Stan Bowes (Evan Peters), a white guy, married with children and a Cadillac, who is conducting a love affair with a delicate ballroom beauty named Angel (Indya Moore). In the pilot, Stan rolls into Trump Tower for a job interview. The interviewer (named Matt Bromley and played by James Van Der Beek) is an evil preppy, a craven yuppie, a toxic bro, and a florid symptom of eighties excess. “For the first time in American history, it’s considered a good thing to flaunt your success,” Matt says. This would be news to Thorstein Veblen, but never mind. Matt proceeds to catalogue the fabulousness of his car, his watch, his suit, and his Cyndi Lauper concert tickets, before snorting cocaine from a mirror and hailing, “God bless Ronald Reagan.”

“Pose” loves a message, and, if it is working its way around to sending a coherent one about Trumpism as the gaudy apotheosis of male, white, corporate oppression, I assume it will arrive with the squawk-and-trill fanfare of an incoming fax. But so far what I get from the infliction of this fictionalized Trump Organization on an audience already compelled to fret about the daily reality of the Trump Presidency is the sense of a show undermining its clarity by pointlessly underlining its relevance. If Stan worked as, say, a bond trader, we wouldn’t have this nasty nonsense distracting us from his complicated romance with Angel. They meet when she is prostituting herself to make the rent and he is cruising in search of satisfying inarticulate longing. He sets her up in an apartment like a proper kept woman. She thrills at his affection and trembles with misgivings at once, and, meanwhile, she defects from the house led by Elektra Abundance to join Blanca’s ragtag crew.

That Elektra keeps losing so much quality talent can be ascribed to her management style. Elektra is queenly in her regal carriage, her leonine majesty, her cruel hauteur, and her every autocratic utterance. Early on, stealing an idea from Blanca and quashing objections to the theft, Elektra lectures, “Just because you have an idea does not mean you know how to properly execute it.” Jackson bites off the phrase “properly execute” in a manner heretofore unheard in the history of English, laying equal stress on each vicious syllable. She never simply speaks; she enounces. The writers’ room consistently supplies stilted syntax to suit her imperious delivery, and Jackson reliably italicizes her lines with terrifically witchy gestures. The show is at its most fun when she is on the ballroom floor. I would gladly watch a whole episode devoted to her preparations for walking in a “Dynasty”-themed category.

“Pose” will not deign to accommodate such frivolity, but its earnestness has its rewards. In the fourth episode, Elektra advances toward gender-confirmation surgery; the men in Blanca’s maternal orbit visit a clinic for an H.I.V. test; and a minor character, despairing over her stick figure, submits to a back-alley enhancement surgery. The tidiness of the medical triptych is a bit pat, but the performances snap with messy vitality—especially Jackson’s, which elegantly indicates the great mass of feeling sequestered behind Elektra’s flawless façade.