Minx, TV review — when a porn publisher and a feminist collaborate

Sex sells. Dense essays about systemic sexism, less so. That’s the dispiriting lesson awaiting Joyce Prigger when she tries to pitch her feminist journal The Matriarchy Awakens to a stream of unenthused publishers at an industry convention in 1970s LA. They question the value — commercial or otherwise — of a magazine that seeks to inspire and empower women.

But interest comes from one unexpected and, as far as Joyce is concerned, unwanted source: the cigar-chomping, open-shirted owner of a bespoke publishing house, whose illustrious periodicals include Giant Jugs and Milky Moms. When it transpires that he’s the only person to have bothered to read and consider Joyce’s prototype issue, she realises that you can’t always judge someone by the cover of their magazines.

Minx, a sharp and immensely enjoyable HBO comedy series (streaming on Paramount Plus in the UK), revolves around this unlikely collaboration. Ophelia Lovibond’s politically progressive yet prim-and-proper Joyce and Jake Johnson’s affably seedy Doug Renetti set out to create an intellectually-heavyweight, soft-porn publication for a female readership.

While it may sound like a typical odd-couple yarn, the series is less governed by these standard frictions than by the curiously effective symbiosis of serious discourse and entertainment. Like its magazine, Minx adeptly uses the allure of sex and humour to invite its audience to engage with issues of agency, objectification, shame and gender-based hypocrisies. “You’ve got to hide the medicine,” Doug tells Joyce when she’s initially reluctant to sully her urgent articles with nudity. “It’ll be classy, not a shvantz in the face,” he reassures her.

And so Joyce comes around to the idea that one way to destabilise phallocentricity is to display an impressive phallus in a centrefold and subject it to the female gaze. What follows is a lengthy montage sequence in which the manhood of every Tom, er, Dick and Harry who comes to audition is assessed by the magazine staff. The unsparingly graphic nudity (even by HBO’s standards) might be a little full-on for some viewers.

Still, the assault of flesh is more than balanced out by some nicely fleshed-out characters. “People can be more than one thing”, Doug repeatedly reminds Joyce — who is left reeling when he references Proust. For all the nudity, sexual politics and risqué (frequently very funny) jokes, Minx is also driven by a wholesome, optimistic view that humans are endlessly surprising. Doug (played by Johnson with a rare, natural charm) and his colleagues may inhabit a modern Gomorrah, but they prove themselves to be far more enlightened and savvy than the ostensibly refined but leery businessmen at Joyce’s tennis club. Joyce meanwhile learns to slacken her moral sententiousness and her cerebral (and squeamish) attitude towards sex.

With time Joyce comes to accepts that the magazine probably won’t land her the Pulitzer prize she’s always dreamed of. Minx itself may not become the most garlanded series on TV, but it’s apt that a show concerned with sexual liberation and awakenings is nothing less than a pleasure to watch.

★★★★☆

On Paramount Plus in the UK and on HBO Max in the US now

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