How ‘Minx’ Was Saved From Becoming “Filmsturbation” in Wild West Era of Streaming

Abbey White
·9 min read
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Last December, with just a week left of filming on Minx season two, the cast of the prestige period comedy about low-rent porn publisher Bottom Dollar and its launch of a fictional (and feminist) Playgirl-esque magazine, got news no one was expecting. They were canceled.

“Our show creator [Ellen Rapoport] kindly called us and said, ‘This is a bad phone call,’ and she relayed the news,” says Minx actress Jessica Lowe, who plays Bambi on the series. It was a moment that Minx star and co-executive producer Jake Johnson adds left the cast “all very shocked.”

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“It was bananas because it happened at a time when we were on all of these year-end best lists,” recalls star Lennon Parham, who plays Shelly, the sister of Minx co-founder Joyce Prigger. “So everybody was just confused. I thought we were in the business of making great television, and we are universally in agreement that this show is great, it pushes boundaries and is a world we’ve never been in before.”

The news came on a Monday as the cast was in the midst of shooting. They had just five days left, including reshoots and a bit of the season two finale. “We were one week away from finishing production, that was a real kick in the head,” Feig previously told The Hollywood Reporter, before revealing the one silver-lining. “They said, ‘But finish the season. Finish shooting the show, finish post.’ They could have easily just pulled the plug if they were looking to save money, but they didn’t.”

Despite getting the chance to wrap things up, the news — at least initially — made it difficult to work for some of the cast. “I just felt off kilter,” recalls Lowe. “I was shooting a scene with Ophelia [Lovibond] in the kitchen, and every time before they yelled ‘action,’ I would be blinking back tears. I could just see how despondent this crew was. People work very hard to make any show, but especially a prestige comedy, and one that’s set in 1973. It’s a lot of work. So all of these 15-hour days, if they were never going to be viewable, felt really cruel. Like, who are we doing this for? It’s just filmsturbation.”

Minx
Jake Johnson in Minx.

But the Minx cast tells THR that the energy around the fate of the series, which was saved by Starz, wasn’t the same across the ensemble. “We were shooting when we found out, so I think what was interesting about that moment was that everybody’s personalities came through. Everybody responded exactly how you might expect to whatever was happening,” recalls Idara Victor. “I just remember Ophelia being like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re fine.'”

“We’re like, ‘OK, bestie but… what?'” Oscar Montoya, who plays Bottom Dollar photographer Richie, recounts while laughing. “Daddy Jake was also like, ‘Oh, we’re fine. We’re fine.'”

“And whenever I’d be like, ‘OK, we’re fine.’ He’d be like, ‘We hope,'” Victor recalls of Johnson, laughing. “I was like, ‘Why are you trying to scare me?'”

According to Victor, some co-stars like Lowe were “asking a million questions” as the group navigated the news through a difficult few days on set, alongside jokes that helped keep everyone’s spirits high. Part of their ability to laugh through the painful moment was because of assurances made by stars Johnson and Lovibond, who felt far more confident that this wasn’t the end of their — or Bottom Dollar’s — story.

“Our experience was a little bit different from everybody else because we got word that Lionsgate was still very excited about the show and this was about taxes. It was a money issue, and they were shopping it,” Johnson tells THR. “Very quickly after that, there were three streamers that were bidding on it. So we knew that it would find a new home, but we were told we are not allowed to make an announcement on that. So I was trying via social media. I put something out where I said, ‘We hear you all. We appreciate you. Good news to come.'”

“We had like a week left of filming when we were in that position, and we didn’t know exactly where we’d be going, but we knew that we would be fine,” Lovibond, who plays Joyce, the feminist mind behind and creator of Minx magazine, adds. “But in that final week of filming, when we saw the incredible messages of support and people being outraged, it actually made it even more enjoyable. We had a precursor taste of people’s enthusiasm for it. It made that last week really great, which is not what people think we’re going to say. You’d imagine us all kind of crying into your coffee cups, but it wasn’t like that. It was just everybody having a bit of a blast.”

Victor and Montoya credited Rapoport and the show’s creative team for remaining transparent through the entire process. “They weren’t trying to hide nothing. They kept it a real. They kept it 100,” Montoya tells THR. “We appreciate that sort of transparency because it shows that they’re with us. We’re fighting this together.”

Victor agrees, adding that while the ensemble had “different perspectives and opinions” on what was happening, it was an experience they “really navigated together” with much the same passion as their onscreen counterparts. “It’s very Bottom Dollar. It literally felt like a reflection of Bottom Dollar and how we would handle things,” she says.

“It did feel weirdly fortuitous,” adds Lovibond. “Obviously, in the Deep Throat episode, Doug is saying we’re back, and we’re bigger than ever. We’d already shot all of that, but rewatching, it did kind of feel like a very happy accident. It looks like that’s been placed, but that was already there. There was a harmony to what was happening in reality and what you see onscreen.”

The decision by Max (formerly HBO Max) to cut ties with the series created by Rapoport came amid a larger cost-cutting effort at the streamer and its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, following the April 2022 merger. Since then, a number of shows have not only been canceled or killed mid-production, but others have been removed entirely from the platform, with some sent to stream on Netflix and others with no new distribution available. WBD’s decision would also spark other entertainment distributors like Paramount+, Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu to cancel or remove content from their libraries.

“It feels like the Wild West, to be honest. I’ve had shows canceled before, but not while we’re shooting. That was crazy,” Parham says. “When a show got canceled, you knew why. It’s not doing the right numbers. It didn’t hit the way they wanted it to. They’re not creatively happy with it. But when all those boxes are checked, or you don’t have access to how it’s doing because it’s streaming — but people are talking about it — you’re like, ‘Well, what makes it worthwhile? Why are we canning it? Is it a bottom line thing? Is it arbitrary? Is it a new boss who doesn’t know you?'”

“It used to feel you didn’t have a whole lot of power, but at least you knew what was coming down the pike, and now it just feels like you’d have no idea, and it’s a little scary,” Parham adds.

Minx
Oscar Montoya and Ophelia Lovibond in Minx.

Co-executive producer and star Johnson says the realization that “you’re working for people in companies where it’s not personal” in the way it can be for artists and audiences makes things start to feel “a little bit wacky.” He also spoke to how Minx talks directly to the experience of doing business in Hollywood right now, amid a Writers Guild strike and a looming SAG-AFTRA strike. That includes the confusing signals around what it means to be successful in the streaming era.

“What I feel connected to is that we’re in an era of these big corporations taking over all these art forms, and big business is figuring out how to squeeze as much profit as they can out of people who want to tell stories and act in stories for audience members who love to watch those stories,” he tells THR. “So it felt really interesting to be making a show about a little magazine and there’s people trying to blow up Bottom Dollar. The city’s against it, the counsel people are against it, while the reason we got canceled from HBO Max was numbers. It was money. It’s as simple as a data sheet.”

Feig, who is no stranger to shows getting canceled, noted that what happened with Minx felt both familiar and unfamiliar in terms of how the industry has historically and is currently operating. But the current climate is why he’s particularly excited to have Minx at a home like Starz, where there is both a linear and streaming component, offering a chance for a wider audience and for more permanence.

“Unless you’re a painter who burns his paintings when he’s done with them, that’s the only reason we do this. We want as many people to see it, as many people to enjoy and find it,” he says. “I’ve always said I would rather sell a show to QVC — be the first scripted show on QVC — than get some cool streamer that nobody’s ever heard of because we want people to see our stuff.”

But the executive producer also noted that the effort to save Minx has always been part of the show’s story, after “nobody would pick it up” as they were pitching it for its first season.

“They were just afraid of it for different reasons. Some, I think, because of the subject matter, others just because it was a ’70s show — a million different reasons we heard. So, we all walked away going, ‘It’s dead,’ and it was dead for months,” he says. “Minx was always a phoenix.”

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