After several prestigious but straight-faced 70s-set dramas, I have come to expect a more sombre tone from shows hovering around that era, but to my pleasant surprise Minx (Paramount+) is a total hoot. Ophelia Lovibond plays Joyce, an earnest liberal arts college graduate attempting to get a radical feminist magazine off the ground in California in the early 1970s, where the ties are big, the collars are bigger, and the sideburns are truly outrageous.
Outrage plays its own part in Minx, whether it’s the characters stoking the flames of controversy, or the show itself. For some mysterious reason, Joyce fails to find a backer for her furiously political magazine, The Matriarchy Awakens, despite telling the publishers of successful women’s glossies that their diets-and-romance agenda is not the future. “Why is she so angry?” says one businessman among a sea of many businessmen. (The gender balance of the advertising and publishing industries here makes Mad Men look like a feminist utopia.)
