“This feels like the beginning of something,” Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond) says in Season 2 of “Minx.” She’s referring to the early ’70s, when America was rethinking gender roles and sexual rules, creating an opening for her to start the feminist porn magazine that gives the comedy its title.
But this was almost the end of something for “Minx.” HBO Max, which ran the first season in 2022, canceled the show as the second was finishing production, leaving fans holding an empty brown wrapper.
Season 1, in which Joyce started Minx with the low-rent pornographer Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), was a rough ride; its raunchy pop history and sitcommy odd-couple high jinks didn’t completely mesh. But I’d rather watch a show that does an exciting thing inconsistently than one that does a dull thing well.
The series was revived by Starz, which brings it back on Friday. The eight new episodes don’t entirely clean up its freewheeling mess, but they make up for it in verve and enthusiasm. “Minx” is a racy, smart snapshot, and you just have to accept certain blemishes unretouched.
Created by Ellen Rapoport, “Minx” is a bit of an alternative history. The sort of magazine it envisions — essentially Ms., if it added beefcake centerfolds and became a newsstand blockbuster — didn’t exist. But the series makes a credible-enough-for-comedy case that, if the dissolute energies of the post-’60s were channeled slightly differently, it might have.
“Minx” introduced Joyce as an idealistic Vassar grad pitching her mock-up for a polemical journal, The Matriarchy Awakens. Doug, a motor-mouthed sleaze with a nose for the zeitgeist, believes she’s on to something, but only if they can make it commercial. “You gotta hide the medicine,” he says, even if that means using male models with nothing to hide. (“Minx” may be TV’s biggest bastion of equal-opportunity nudity.)
The first season followed the retooling of Doug’s company, Bottom Dollar Productions, into the scrappy vanguard of the sexual revolution. Season 2 finds the magazine successful, but struggling to keep its soul.
Joyce, who the first season often caricatured as naïve and uptight (“prig” is in her surname), is now a confident boss, becoming the kind of public intellectual she set out to be. Doug is adjusting to achieving his biggest success at the price of becoming superfluous in his own company. And their platonic pairing adds a third wheel in Constance Papadopoulos (Elizabeth Perkins), a wealthy investor who speaks the language of empowerment but whose money comes with strings.
But “Minx” really excels with its supporting characters. Joyce’s sister, Shelly (Lennon Parham, whose performance is a small miracle), is rethinking her suburban-mom existence after a fling with Bambi (Jessica Lowe), Bottom Dollar’s C.F.O., or “Chief Fun Officer.” Tina (Idara Victor), Doug’s lieutenant and on-and-off lover, explores her own career ambitions, which may not be compatible with Doug’s.
The season’s most distinctive subplot involves Richie (Oscar Montoya), Minx’s art director and photographer. His sensibility as a gay artist has shaped and elevated the magazine’s aesthetic, but he has to keep his creativity in check lest Minx be seen as a magazine for gay men. His pet project, an artistic photo shoot at a bathhouse, is a window on another kind of liberation that couldn’t as easily go mainstream.
“Minx” plays all of this lightly, both awed and amused by the treasures it finds in our culture’s attic. The tone is less like “The Deuce,” HBO’s historical drama of the porn biz, and more like “GLOW,” the Netflix comedy about women’s pro wrestling in the 1980s. Like Doug, it believes in hiding the medicine.
“Minx” has a playful feel for how the politics of an era gets exposed — in this case, fully frontally — by its pulp culture. A Season 2 episode takes place at a screening of the landmark porn flick “Deep Throat,” which is enough of a mainstream sensation that the showing attracts “the Alans: Alda and Arkin.” (Joyce scoffs at the movie’s premise, in which a woman finds satisfaction through a clitoris located in her throat. “It’s always in the last place you look,” Tina says.)
Period comedies like this often end up speed-running through familiar cultural markers. “Minx” has its share of swinger parties and streakers; the Minx office gathers to watch the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match with Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
But “Minx” also has an offbeat interest in the intellectual and artistic history of the time. At the “Deep Throat” premiere, for instance, Joyce bumps into Joan Didion, a celebrity sighting that impresses her more than either Alan. Another episode works in appearances by young versions of the Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz and the astronomer Carl Sagan.
The show’s willingness to zig where ’70s stories usually zag is reflected in its aesthetic. The soundtrack, overseen by the music supervisor Brienne Rose, mostly avoids the usual AM-rock suspects in favor of deep cuts like “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” by the underappreciated singer-songwriter Judee Sill — who is portrayed in Season 2 at a jam session with an about-to-break-big Linda Ronstadt.
That “Minx” feels especially excited about exploring hidden corners of the ’70s — the should-have-beens along with the household names — says something about its underdog heart. It remains a comedy about authenticity and compromise, how much you can change your vision until it isn’t your vision anymore.
Season 2 can feel disjointed and compressed, as if some connective material was cut to get it to eight episodes (the first ran for 10). But it finishes strong, as the conflict over Richie’s bathhouse project grows and Minx has to consider whether it’s too risky for the magazine to speak to gay men, or even gay women.
At moments like this, the historical fiction feels not entirely historical. The idea of whether the larger audience is “ready” for a certain population to be openly themselves — whether one group’s liberation justifies putting another’s on hold — is not so different from what you sometimes hear today in, for instance, the debate over transgender rights. “Minx” is a spicy, fun look back at the beginning of something. But it’s also a reminder that some patterns never end.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com