When Minx was shooting the finale of this second season, it received the news that its then home in the US, HBO Max, was going back on its renewal and was dropping the show. It looked as if this vibrant and lively 70s-set sex-mag comedy, which never quite seems to have found the audience that it deserves, was dead in the water. But another US network, Starz, threw it a lifeline, and here it is, thrusting its “queen of dicks” Joyce Prigger back into the spotlight.
By 1973, Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) has turned a pornographic publisher’s pet project into the bestselling new women’s magazine in the US, with a two-year waiting list for advertisers to tout their wares in its pages. As season one ended with publisher Doug (Jake Johnson) handing ownership of the magazine to Joyce, the first job at hand is to get the old band back together. Though they can barely make it through a minute without bickering, Doug and Joyce work best when they’re a duo, provoking each other and being annoyed at each other’s shortcomings. One of the show’s many clever decisions is to make Joyce a bit of a prude, still tied up in the academia of her feminist studies at university, even if she’s having to highlight the witticisms of famous women by slotting them into a calendar full of nude men. (“It pulls focus from the schlongs!” argues Doug.)
