Looking to get a feminist magazine off the ground, a young woman pitches her idea to a cavalcade of uninterested men. Only one gives her the time of day, and he happens to be a purveyor of porn in the San Fernando Valley. Why not serve up some male nudity along with those serious-minded articles, he suggests? A spoonful of sugar and all that. She hates the idea. Hates it. But having no other options, she agrees. That’s the premise of “Minx” on HBO Max, a snappy workplace dramedy drenched in the sunny glare of early 1970s Southern California.
Beefcakes alongside meaty ideas may sound like an unlikely pairing, but that’s true of the show’s central duo as well. Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) is earnest, uptight and inexperienced, but she’s also clear about the value of a magazine that takes women’s agency as its raison d’etre. Doug (Jake Johnson) is the confident, louche, easygoing publisher who wears his shirts generously unbuttoned and understands the kind of hustle that keeps his scrappy company afloat, with magazines such as Feet Feet Feet and Bodacious Butts.
She’s the iron nightingale, he’s the swashbuckling sleaze: Can they make magazine magic together? To start, Joyce’s proposed title, The Matriarchy Awakens, is tossed overboard for the far catchier Minx. But actually getting the magazine going is a complicated stop-start process that kicks up all kinds of dust along the way — a good amount from Joyce herself, who sees this venture as an X-rated Faustian bargain. Only gradually does she come around to the idea that in order to lead the liberated charge, the pages of her magazine will also need to be a spectacle of schlongs. A plethora of peni. A delirium of … you get the idea.
