If the word wife is in the title, expect suds. This is a cardinal rule of television, established by Desperate Housewives, cemented by the Real Housewives, and perpetuated by the many scripted and unscripted series those ravenously consumed foremothers begat: The Good Wife, Sister Wives, Basketball Wives, Mob Wives, The Ex-Wife, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But really, wife titles have been shorthand for scandalous fun since the 14th century, when Chaucer made “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” the raunchiest of his Canterbury Tales. As the backstory of its eponymous five-time widow suggests, the ur-wife is a character with carnal experience, sexually empowered and financially secure but also subject to a man’s rule. Hence the steam—and the scheming.
You’d think 600-plus years and successive waves of feminism would have put paid to this archetype… and yet, though sexual candor predominates, the patriarchy persists. And so the diabolical minds behind summer TV have managed to dream up what might be the wildest, silliest, and soapiest wife show ever made—which, I know, is saying a lot. Adapted from May Cobb’s novel, Netflix’s The Hunting Wives has it all: kidnapped teens, age-gap affairs, buried secrets, crooked clergy, swinging politicians, shadowy stalkers, ravenous bisexuals, substances galore, a murder. And that’s just in the three episodes provided for review. It’s also about the Trump-era culture wars. Even if you cringe a bit at its crassness (as I did), you kind of have to admire it (as I also do) for always doing the most. Wife-show junkies, meet your new addiction.
The Hunting Wives begins with a pretty basic soap opera premise: Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow) has just moved from Boston—sorry, Cambridge, where the show keeps reminding us Harvard is—to small-town Texas for her husband Graham’s (Evan Jonigkeit) new job. A former political PR pro and generic East Coast Liberal, Sophie is now the full-time mom to a young son (Emmett Moss). So you can guess how she feels when she finds herself at a rollicking NRA fundraiser on the vast estate of Graham’s new employer, the super-rich oilman and aspiring Republican governor Jed Banks (a smug Dermot Mulroney). There she encounters Jed’s beguiling wife, Margo (Malin Akerman), who initiates Sophie into her circle of glamorous, snarky, hard-drinking, gun-toting, red-voting wives. Fish out of water, meet queen bee.
But there’s a twist to this upstart-vs.-diva plot. Sophie first lays eyes on Margo in one of the mansion’s bathrooms, which Margo is scouring for a maxi pad. When her guest doesn’t have one either, Margo strips down, shoves some paper towels in her lacy underwear, and asks Sophie (who’s dressed in long-sleeved black number a dismayed Graham labeled “Soviet”) to zip up her slinky green gown. Then Sophie shares her Xanax stash with Margo; they clink pills, champagne-flute style, and exchange meaningful glances. Occurring less than five minutes into the premiere, this scene gives us our first inkling that these two women might be more likely to make out with each other than to feud for supremacy within their clique—which is also to say it’s our first indication that The Hunting Wives is to soap operas what Secretary is to rom-coms.
Margo is the horny, imperious sun that Maple Brook, TX revolves around, and Akerman both smolders in the role and seems to be having a ton of fun with it. We learn early on that Margo and Jed have extensive extramarital sex lives. But don’t call it an open marriage! As Margo explains to Sophie: “Open marriages are for liberals. We just keep it simple. I don’t sleep with other men, and when Jed and I see a girl we like, we go for it.” (Not that she always adheres to those rules. Something else she tells Sophie: “I believe in doing whatever the f-ck I want.”) One girl Margo likes more than Jed might prefer is her skeet-shooting buddy Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), who immediately senses a rival in Sophie. For her part, Sophie is bored without her job and chafing within her marriage to a man who, despite his Harvard-polished manners, can be judgmental and controlling. Both women are running away from shameful pasts.
The question of whether Margo and Jed’s unconventional arrangement would hurt his campaign arises early, and the way the series handles it is emblematic of The Hunting Wives’ perceptive take on the new right. This constituency, Jed points out, doesn’t care about the (hetero)sexual transgressions of its macho leaders: “They don’t want a Boy Scout. They want a man.” If Donald Trump can get re-elected President after being held liable for sexual abuse, who in Texas is going to blink at the consensual nonmonogamy of a Republican gubernatorial candidate? Yet Margo rightly worries about double standards around gender and sexuality that guarantee she’ll face scrutiny if it comes out that she, too, is sleeping with other women. From Graham’s surveillance of Sophie to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do debauchery of Margo’s friends, who regularly get wasted at honkytonk girls nights but wouldn’t miss a Sunday at church, the show gets that hypocrisy is a bipartisan phenomenon. It’s enough to make you forgive all the glib political references, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to “deplorables.” Once in a while, there’s even a painfully keen zinger. “There are no clinics left to bomb—thanks to us,” one character brags.
All of the above would’ve been more than enough to fuel a season of salacious froth, but the series’ maximalism extends to more than just Margo’s sex life. (Before we move off the latter topic, though, let me just say: There are two separate scenes within the first three episodes where someone stumbles upon a couple in flagrante and one of the lovers meets that person’s gaze with a saucy smirk. Both involve Margo.) As is obligatory on TV these days, there is a murder mystery; early episodes are framed by flash-forwards to a blonde woman, her face obscured so it’s impossible to tell which of multiple blonde characters she is, fighting for her life in the nighttime woods. The kidnapping of a teen girl months earlier lingers in the background.
The local megachurch is its own whole thing, with Shondaland stalwart Katie Lowes giving a delightfully overbearing performance as Jill, a preacher’s wife and Margo sidekick who’s plotting to profit off of her husband’s influence. Jill’s teenage son Brad (George Ferrier) is just as calculating, if not nearly as savvy, pressuring his pious girlfriend Abby (Madison Wolfe) for a repeat of their prom-night hookup while pursuing other partners. The church’s guitar-wielding youth minister, Pastor Pete (played by the late Paul Teal), senses friction within the relationship but has ulterior motives of his own. Abby’s mother, Starr, a frumpy, low-income outcast in a sea of McMansion-dwelling trophy wives, is played by This Is Us alum Chrissy Metz, one of the show’s top-billed actors. So it’s curious to see her get so little screen time in the first few episodes.
The Hunting Wives is too much, in ways both delectable and exhausting. Executive producer and showrunner Rebecca Cutter risks running out of steam in the back half of the season, let alone in a second. But for now, at least, its sheer exuberance keeps all the try-hard naughtiness from feeling excessively self-satisfied. (The gnawing guilt viewers of certain political persuasions might feel at reveling in lightly satirized MAGA nihilism as its real-life fallout reverberates around the globe is another story.) The Wife of Bath would surely recognize an heir in Margo—and, I think, approve.
