If Section Leader Miles hadn’t been down with that accursed Long Covid thing, none of this would have happened.

The Big Screen at the end of the Conference Room had apparently been left on an entertainment channel from 10:47 yesterday morning until something approaching 8:00 p.m. No news. No crawl. No emergencies. Just raw, unapologetic personal entertainment.

We support all three forms—news, culture, and escape—but Miles is usually disciplined about such things. Even now, working from what he calls his office off the Sixth Floor Galley, he keeps Fox murmuring in the background the way some people keep a fish tank. White noise with teeth.

He hadn’t come down to see how the Production Meeting was going during these dregs of the Old Year. He’d encouraged Melissa and Rocket to turn out something short, solid, and humorous—something to cope with a week where Friday has been jammed into Thursday and 2025 has been abruptly lopped off and carried to the curb with ceremonial respect.

That’s when Ollie showed up.
And the day fell apart.

He came in hot, carrying a torch and a remote control.
“There is a new hit show we’ve never heard of,” he announced, slightly winded from the dash past the Concierge Station. “You need to witness both seasons.”
Ollie was fully prepared to change the messaging channel on the big flat screen. Normally this would have triggered resistance. Instead, as an alternative to anything constructive, we agreed.

What followed was a full-day immersion into Minx, a series none of us had heard of that turned out to be the most electrifying use of post-Christmas holiday time imaginable.

Season One crept up on us. Splash, skeptical at first, slowly surrendered to the astonishing account of a woman who—sort of—becomes the Queen of modern porn production in 1973. The year some of us graduated from college.

On the gigantic Conference Room screen, the show detonated in color and confidence. Refreshments appeared from the Galley: good sandwiches, tall pitchers of cold sipping stuff. Attention narrowed. The room changed temperature.

The clothes alone were a revelation—bizarre, bright, defiant. The death of the Patriarchy played out not as theory but as lived chaos. Issues that once had the Boomers riveted came roaring back, only now rendered in high-definition irony.

Male genitalia—something we’ve all encountered in context—was splashed across the wall in unapologetic full color. For the women, tops and bottoms were optional, worn or discarded by bold young actresses parading through scenes that would have been unthinkable on a screen this large when they actually happened.

By morning, the Production Meeting opened to questions.

The notes from before Episode One suggested we were supposed to continue examining why the 4% of the world’s population living in the United States controls a staggering share of global GDP. Instead, we’d watched twenty-seven episodes from a time when America was busily dismantling itself and calling it liberation.

It was probably for the best that Miles was out sick.

He would have been appalled at the state of the Conference Room this morning. We’d show you, but Legal advised laying off the nudity in the Socotra House Daily. Fair enough.

Maybe we’ll do something serious in the New Year.

Still—Minx deserves a third season.

Get on board.

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com