The first season of Minx, back when the series was on HBO Max, was a 1970s-set show about a fictional women’s-erotica magazine that started to hit its stride near the end of its nine episodes. Then it was one of the many David Zaslav victims — canceled, even though its second season was fully written and already in production, and wiped entirely from the platform. Then it was rescued by Starz, which added Minx’s second season to a Friday-night summer lineup that is superficially incoherent (Outlander, Minx, and the wrestling drama Heels) but makes total cohesive sense (TV should be fun, shouldn’t it?). The upside of this tumult is a second season that gets a bit of a Zaslav-revenge glow-up: Minx has not entirely resolved the issues it could never quite shake in the first season, but it’s still significantly improved. Elizabeth Perkins enters as the magazine’s sugar mama, Constance Papadoplous, who gets to swan around in beehive hairdos and enormous patterned caftans, and two star players who got short shrift last time have bigger roles that now make Minx much more reliable.
The series had a season-one protagonist problem that sent a deep, stubborn taproot down into its bedrock premise. Its lead character, Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), was, as her name suggests, kind of a prig, and that character note was the primary engine for conflict and growth while also being a little implausible and a lot of a bummer. Despite being presented with a joyful parade of dick pics, and despite the demonstrable audience for that material, Joyce could not let go of her hang-ups, perpetually almost learning a lesson about the hypocrisy of her moralizing, only to turn up in the next episode once again insisting that a dry, lengthy piece on gender inequality should get priority over a spread full of cheerful nude men. Minx could never decide whether to emphasize Joyce’s growth or her stubborn cluelessness and got stuck looping through both.
The most frustrating symptom of that problem was that Joyce perpetually underestimated her sister, Shelly (Lennon Parham), and colleague Bambi (Jessica Lowe). Shelly stood in for the exhausted housewife who just wanted to escape, but she lacked the time and runway to be a meaningful foil for Joyce’s idealism, while Bambi, a former porn model, represented the possibility that erotica could be a serious, worthwhile pursuit despite Joyce’s misgivings. Although it seemed clear that Minx knew Joyce was in the wrong, season one couldn’t translate that into the show itself giving those characters their due.
Season two is such a relief. Minx finally allows Joyce to absorb some lessons about what her audiences want and how feminism can be powerful without being pedantic. She’s not perfect, and her underlying assumptions and biases still cause stumbles here and there, but she’s cannier and more open to learning and eventually lets herself experience some of the sexual openness she’s been so unwilling to value.
Most importantly, though, season two puts all its chips on Bambi and Shelly, and Lowe and Parham’s performances continue to validate every scene they’re given. Bambi gets more space for professional development and serious consideration of what she most wants out of her career. But Parham’s Shelly, in particular, is where Minx has grown the most. The season begins with a scene that appears to set up Shelly to be furious with her husband, Lenny (Rich Sommer), when she finds another woman’s earring hooked into her living room carpet, then turns the tables by revealing that both are now involved in a large, enthusiastic swingers community. Parham knows how to lean into a down-to-earth straightforwardness, which sharpens the fun of those big sexual exploits, and she’s just as good when the role shifts into gravity. Minx lets Shelly actually confront her feelings about her sister’s blinkered self-absorption, which is a handy patch for many problems all at once: more sexual freedom, more character complexity, more of Minx acknowledging its Joyce problem, and more Lennon Parham! Victory all around!
It’s common for comedies to need time to find themselves, and yet even given that typical growth period, the first season of Minx felt unusual. It was almost at war with itself, bouncing between the relaxed freakiness it seemed to want to play with and a homework-like duty to keep returning to some baseline of sexual restraint. Season two, thank goodness, lets it all hang out.
