Raising Kanan Signs Off: How Sascha Penn Completed Kanan's Origin Story

The dust has settled on Raising Kanan—Starz's gritty 1990s origin tale that traced Mekai Curtis's descent from angry kid to the ruthless Kanan Stark we've seen wreck lives across the Power universe. After laying bare all the betrayal, blood, and bad decisions that built him, the show wrapped with its final season, and creator Sascha Penn sat down to break it all down.

What made Raising Kanan work wasn't just the period setting or the crime-soap drama. It was the thoroughness—Penn and his cast (including Patina Miller as the formidable drug boss Raq) showed us exactly why Kanan became who he is. Every wound, every loss, every compromise led somewhere. That's harder to pull off than it sounds.

With the series in the books, the Power universe isn't done cooking. Talk of Power: Origins suggests there's more genealogy to dig into—more prequel DNA to explore. But Raising Kanan set a high bar: it made you understand a villain before he was fully villainous, which is the opposite of lazy storytelling.

For anyone who slept on the show, it's a solid entry point into what made the Power world worth building in the first place.

Read the full story at Variety → https://variety.com/2026/tv/features/raising-kanan-series-finale-how-raq-dies-power-origins-spinoff-1236829538/