#if you couldn't tell i loathed the afterparty

[cantsayidont]

March 2022. An intermittently amusing but frequently infuriating Ellen Rapoport sitcom, launched on HBO Max and then switched to STARZ for its second season, MINX is set in the early '70s and follows the misadventures of an idealistic white woman named Joyce Pritchard (Ophelia Lovibond), who reluctantly transforms her plan for an intellectual feminist women's magazine into a high-profile adult magazine for women, published by good-natured sleazebag Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), who sees it as a weird but potentially viable addition to his existing magazine line. Joyce is deeply uncomfortable with Doug's world of nude centerfolds and sex toy ads, but as the magazine takes off, she finds she loves being famous — and enjoys taking advantage of her position of power over attractive, often none-too-bright men. Meanwhile, Doug's long-suffering Black girlfriend cum business manager Tina (Idara Victor) wants more respect; gay photographer/art director Richie (Oscar Montoya) struggles with his aspirations to do something better — and editorial directives not to make a magazine full of naked men seem too gay; and Joyce's married older sister Shelly (Lennon Parham), who resents Joyce for leading a kind of life she never got a chance to experience, has an unexpected affair with former nude model Bambi (Jessica Lowe) that leads to a midlife gay awakening.

Like the earlier G.L.O.W. streaming series (which it strongly resembles in structure and tone), MINX wants to be titillating, but its smug middle-class disapproval of porn and sex work is like a millstone around its neck: It's willing to concede that Doug and Tina, who are strictly on the business side, are pretty savvy, but it stubbornly refuses to entertain the notion that anyone who poses for or performs in porn could harbor any real intellect — the male models are all hunkier versions of Lenny from OF MICE AND MEN, and even Bambi, who's arguably the show's most likable character, is presented as a kind of idiot savant. Moreover, the show walks a weird line of expecting the audience to laugh at Joyce's second-wave feminist priggishness while also presuming that she's ultimately right, morally if not practically, in ways the narrative doesn't really support. The problem with Joyce is not that she's a feminist buzzkill, but that she's an entitled, classist snob who struggles to conceal her obvious contempt for anyone she considers her social or intellectual inferior (and who becomes an increasingly terrible boss as the magazine takes off). However, for the show to really engage with why Joyce is terrible would require the writers to reexamine their own prejudices, which they're obviously unwilling to do.

MINX remains watchable mostly on the strength of its supporting characters — Tina, Richie, Bambi, and Shelly are more interesting and far more appealing than Joyce — but it would be nice if the show were less eager to make them the punchline of the joke. The show also further strains goodwill with the unwelcome addition of the intolerable Elizabeth Perkins as a wealthy widow who becomes the new owner of Doug's publishing empire (an insufferable rich bitch completely indistinguishable from the insufferable rich bitch Perkins played in the second season of the agonizing comedy-mystery THE AFTERPARTY), a character whose narrative function is make the tug-of-war between Joyce and Doug largely irrelevant and to add an additional layer of smug white lady entitlement to a storyline already top-heavy with it.