How ‘Minx,’ a Comedy About ’70s Porn, Survived a Hollywood Shake-Up

When information broke in December that Max (then HBO Max) had determined to successfully cancel Minx, a collective shudder went via Hollywood creatives. It wasn’t simply that Minx—a captivating, dick-filled comedy in regards to the launch of a Playgirl-style journal within the ’70s—was a critically profitable present. It was that Minx had already obtained a second season order from the community and was, in truth, on the final week of capturing that season. Showrunners, writers, and casts have been left questioning, “If HBO may up and again out of a present it had already put a lot cash and confidence into, then who’s to say it couldn’t occur to us?”

What Max did with Minx is known as “writing down,” and it’s changing into more and more widespread. Networks, seeking to lower prices, can declare that an asset (on this case, a present) has depreciated extra quickly than anticipated. They “write down” the worth of the present on the books, making it price lower than it was initially, subsequently ending up with an total loss on their stability sheet and a large tax deduction. It really works for current reveals and for beforehand commissioned work, therefore why so many Paramount and Disney originals have been disappearing from their streaming providers in latest months. (The truth is, Disney not too long ago reported that it took $1.5 billion in write-offs this spring, which specialists have attributed to all that vanishing content material.)

Some Hollywood fits could be fast to remind creatives that it’s referred to as “present enterprise,” not “present safety,” and there are different causes networks write down content material, from attempting to keep away from licensing or residual funds to the money they get from shuffling content material over to a FAST (free, ad-supported streaming TV) service like Pluto TV or Tubi.

Nonetheless, none of that basically helped ease the ache when Minx showrunner Ellen Rapoport needed to inform her solid and crew in regards to the present’s potential cancellation. She’d heard about it just a few days earlier than from the present’s manufacturing firm, Lionsgate, who’d urged her to maintain it to herself. The corporate had stored the information from her so long as it may and tried to place a optimistic spin on it, saying that HBO would pay to complete out the second season and couldn’t bar them from taking it elsewhere. However nonetheless, Rapoport says, it felt like “a shit sandwich inside a croissant, like, ‘We love the present, you are canceled, however you are going to discover a new dwelling.’”

She stored the information to herself as she ready to direct the finale, the entire time questioning if that week was the final one she’d ever spend on a Minx set. She lastly received the go-ahead to inform the actors on a Friday, when Lionsgate began to sense that information would break within the trades the next week. “My greatest nightmare was that we’d be on set and an article would come out,” says Rapoport. She took the time that weekend to name the present’s six sequence regulars—Ophelia Lovibond, Jake Johnson, Lennon Parham, Oscar Montoya, Jessica Lowe, and Idara Victor—in addition to recurring visitors Wealthy Sommer and Elizabeth Perkins. “Everybody was shocked, as a result of this had by no means even been within the ether,” Rapoport says. “We’d by no means even talked about it.”

The truth is, Rapoport says, neither she nor anybody else concerned with the manufacturing of the present had ever actually gotten viewership numbers from Max. These sorts of stats are held notoriously near the vest at streaming firms, which is irritating for actors and creators, who’re left just about in the dead of night in regards to the standing of their present (and, as actors presently putting will inform you, the standing of their paltry residuals). “They informed us that we had a really excessive completion charge of about 90 %, which was superb, they usually informed us that our viewers was evenly break up between women and men,” Rapoport says. “That’s all they actually stated, aside from that our viewership was on par with reveals like Julia and Hacks.”

Minx showrunner Ellen Rapoport

The week after Rapoport informed her actors, she received a name from Lionsgate telling her that the story was about to interrupt and that she needed to inform everybody else engaged on the present. “I attempted to maintain morale up,” she says. “It is clearly very startling to suppose that the factor you have been engaged on for months and months and months may simply be disappeared, and nobody will ever see it, however I attempted to make the purpose that HBO Max distributed us in North America and Latin America, however Lionsgate owns us and distributes us all through the world.” She was assured Minx would discover one other distributor.

Rapoport says that when information broke that Minx was off Max, Lionsgate was having severe talks with about 4 completely different potential consumers. Whereas she knew that the possibilities of it touchdown some other place have been fairly strong, she wasn’t allowed to explicitly inform anybody engaged on the present. “I simply tried to reassure them that I felt like it might be OK,” she explains.