“This feels like the start of something,” says Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond) on Season 2 of “Minx.” She refers to the early 1970s when America was rethinking gender roles and sexual rules, which created 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, whose first season ran in 2022, canceled the show as the second wrapped production, leaving fans with an empty brown box.
Season 1, which started Joyce Minx dating cheesy pornographer Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), was a rough ride; his raunchy pop history and sitcommy odd-couple high jinks didn’t quite mesh. But I’d rather watch a show that does something exciting inconsistently than one that does something boring well.
The series was revived by Starz, which is bringing it back on Friday. The eight new episodes don’t quite clean up the free-spirited mess, but make up for it with verve and enthusiasm. “Minx” is a snappy smart snapshot, and you just have to accept that certain imperfections haven’t been updated.
Created by Ellen Rapoport, “Minx” is a bit of alternate history. The kind of magazine it envisioned — essentially madam, if it added beefcake centerfolds and became a newsstand blockbuster — didn’t exist. But the series makes credible enough-for-comedy evidence that if the riotous energies of the ’60s had been channeled something else, that might have been the case.
“Minx” introduced Joyce as an idealistic Vassar grad who pitched her mock-up to a polemical magazine, The Matriarchy Awakens. Doug, a motor-mouthed slut with a nose for the zeitgeist, believes she’s on to something, but only if they can make it commercial. “You have to hide the drug,” he says, even if that means using male models who have nothing to hide. (“Minx” is perhaps TV’s biggest bastion of equal opportunity nudity.)
The first season followed the transformation of Doug’s company, Bottom Dollar Productions, into the sleazy vanguard of the sexual revolution. Season 2 finds the magazine successful, but struggles to keep its soul.
Joyce, who was often portrayed as naive and uptight (“prig” is in her last name) in the first season, is now a confident boss and becoming the kind of public intellectual she wanted to be. Doug adapts to achieve his greatest success at the cost of becoming redundant 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 minor miracle), rethinks her life as a suburban mom after an affair with Bambi (Jessica Lowe), Bottom Dollar’s CFO or “Chief Fun Officer.” Tina (Idara Victor), Doug’s lieutenant and on-and-off lover, explores her own career aspirations, which may not be compatible with Doug’s.
The season’s most notable 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 must rein in his creativity to avoid Minx being seen as a magazine for gay men. His favorite project, an artistic photoshoot in a bathhouse, is a window into a different kind of liberation that couldn’t easily become mainstream.
“Minx” plays all this lightly, both awed and amused by the treasures it finds in the attic of our culture. The tone is less like “The Deuce,” HBO’s historical drama about the porn world, and more like “GLOW,” the Netflix comedy about women’s pro wrestling in the 1980s. Like Doug, it believes in hiding the drug.
“Minx” has a playful sense of how the politics of an era are laid bare – in this case full head-on – through its pulp culture. An episode of Season 2 takes place during a screening of the groundbreaking porn movie “Deep Throat,” which is enough of a mainstream sensation that the screening attracts “the Alans: Alda and Arkin.” (Joyce scoffs at the film’s premise, in which a woman finds satisfaction through a clitoris down her throat. “It’s always in the last place you look,” says Tina.)
Period comedies like this often run fast 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 unusual interest in the intellectual and artistic history of the time. For example, at the premiere of “Deep Throat,” Joyce runs into Joan Didion, a celebrity sighting who impresses her more than Alan. Another installment 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 saw is reflected in its aesthetic. The soundtrack, overseen by music supervisor Brienne Rose, mostly eschews the usual AM rock suspects in favor of deep cuts like “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” by underrated singer-songwriter Judee Sill – who is portrayed in season 2 during a jam session with an on-the-break major Linda Ronstadt.
That “Minx” is especially keen on exploring hidden corners of the ’70s – the must-haves along with the household names – says something about his underdog heart. It remains a comedy about authenticity and compromise, how much you can change your vision until it is no longer your vision.
Season 2 can feel disjointed and compressed, like some connecting material was cut out to make it to eight episodes (the first one lasted 10). But it ends strong, as the conflict over Richie’s bathhouse project grows and Minx must consider whether it’s too risky for the magazine to talk to gay men or even gay women.
At times like this, the historical fiction doesn’t feel entirely historical. The idea of whether the wider public is “ready” for a given population to openly be themselves – whether that be a group liberation justifies putting someone else on hold – not that different from what you sometimes hear nowadays in, for example, the debate about transgender rights. “Minx” is a snappy, fun throwback to the beginning of something. But it’s also a reminder that some patterns never end.
