A pornographer and a feminist walk into a bar.
At first, “Minx,” which premiered Thursday on HBO Max, sounds like a bad joke or, worse, a bad porn. Instead, it’s a heartwarming, hilarious workplace comedy about naive, idealistic feminist Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) and Doug (Jake Johnson), a slimy publisher of erotic magazines with a heart of gold … coins, that is. Together, they end up with Minx the magazine, part full-frontal nudes, part feminist screed.
“The Doug-Joyce thing is the engine of the show and I think it’s the engine of the magazine,” 43-year-old Johnson, who plays the foul-mouthed publisher, told the Daily News. “They each offer something valuable to the success of this magazine and I think they need each other to work to move it forward.”
Executive producer Paul Feig, best known for “Freaks and Geeks” and “Bridesmaids,” called them strange bedfellows, but he also pointed out how this story, particularly Joyce’s, is how it goes: you want to change the world and eventually you realize you can’t.
“You meet the reality of the industry and find this detente and come out hopefully OK,” he told The News.
“At its core, it’s a story about underdogs trying to get the American dream. People who are very undervalued in what they’re trying to do but rise to the occasion.”
Quickly, Minx’s masthead fills up; as it turns out, a lot of women care about women’s issues. Bambi (Jessica Lowe), a centerfold model for Doug’s men’s magazines, discovers she has a flair for knowing what women want too. Company photographer Richie (Oscar Montoya) is more than happy to shift his camera’s focus. Doug’s right-hand woman, Tina (Idara Victor), finally has a partner in Joyce who can hold her own against the publisher. Even Joyce’s sister, Shelly (Lennon Parham), comes out of the kitchen to help.
It’s Joyce’s growth, though, that drives “Minx,” both the show and the magazine.
“You, as the audience, are there with Joyce,” Lovibond, 36, told The News. “As you see Joyce become more relaxed … you see that unfurling of the tightly coiled prudishness, and we hope the viewers come with us on that.”
She grows accustomed to it all quickly, because she has no choice. If she wants her magazine, if she wants to write about women’s issues and spread her feminist message, she has no other options. Doug and his pornographic pages are her only choice.
Doug has choices other than Joyce. He doesn’t care about Joyce’s message. But he sees her, at the core, as a new audience. She, and the women reading her magazine, are a paycheck. That’s not an insult, or even degrading, in his mind.
“I like that Doug is trying to win at capitalism,” Johnson said.
“I like that Doug has a chip on his shoulder. I like that Doug believes that there is a win in this person and I like that Doug does not care what this person looks like, what gender they are, who they’re sleeping in bed with. ‘Together, we can make a lot of money.’ It’s as simple as that.”
As form follows function, Doug pushes Joyce away from lecturing her readers, just as Johnson and Lovibond stress that “Minx” is not a lecture. It’s a silly romp, full of sex toys and nudity.
Doug and Joyce, as odd as they look from the outside, do work.
“These are people who are halves of the same whole. Doug and Joyce are incomplete people right now,” showrunner Ellen Rapoport told The News.
“The show is about a feminist who becomes a little bit of a pornographer and a pornographer who becomes a little bit of a feminist.”
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