Note: This story contains mild spoilers about “The Hunting Wives.”
“The Hunting Wives” has joined the elite club of buzzed-about Netflix series, wrapping a soap opera around a murder mystery faster than you can say “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Yet perhaps the show’s most intriguing wrinkle involves incorporating just enough political references to feel like a satire of Southern-fried hypocrisy.
In TV parlance, the underlying premise of the Netflix series — which centers on a liberal Bostonian who finds guns, drugs and lots of musically accompanied sex in a Texas town — owes a debt to “Twin Peaks,” the 1990 series that turned the Laura Palmer mystery into a national guessing game, while containing trace ingredients of “Dallas,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Big Little Lies,” “The Righteous Gemstones” and a whole lot in between.
What sets the latest show apart are the throwaway references to conservative red-state politics. Those include, but aren’t limited to, gun rights (and everybody carrying one), dog-whistle racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, abortion access, gender roles (one of the women purrs, “We don’t work. We wife”) and a reference to the show’s gun-toting sisterhood as “little Marjorie Taylor Greenes,” the outspoken and often ridiculed Georgia congresswoman.
From that perspective, “The Hunting Wives” — originally produced by Lionsgate TV for Starz, before Netflix opportunistically picked it up — dropped at just the right time in the right place.
The show lands in the midst of the tumult and apprehension surrounding the Trump administration and so-called anti-woke movement, which has bled widely beyond politics into pop culture. As for the venue, it’s apt to find more viewers because of Netflix’s vast platform, including those who get most of their news from TikTok videos but can feel a little smarter by connecting the otherwise escapist drama, with all its delicious salaciousness, to current events and tabloid-worthy headlines.
In that sense, “Hunting Wives” has it both ways, dressing up what would normally be considered a “guilty pleasure” with a dollop of political satire. For those seeking a little more meaning from their eight-episode binge, it helps alleviate some of the “guilty” part.
The key point, of course, is that for all their conspicuous church attendance, the principal characters break every commandment and perhaps create a few new ones to violate.
The audience gets to see all that through the eyes of the new arrival, Sophie (Brittany Snow), a classic fish out of water who gets lead down a proverbial path to temptation by Margo (Malin Akerman), the resident queen bee. Despite her flashy lifestyle, Margo has good reason for concern about people peeking beneath the surface or rummaging through her closets, fearing such scrutiny if her wealthy husband (Dermot Mulroney) runs for governor.
“Hunting Wives” doesn’t “tiptoe around words like ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative,’” as critic Angie Han noted in a favorable review in The Hollywood Reporter. In an interview with TheWrap, showrunner Rebecca Cutter acknowledged that she enhanced the political undertones for the series that were not in the original book.
Cutter told TheWrap she thought the show would be more relevant “if we don’t shy away from the culture war stuff,” despite some apprehension that “a bigger deal was going to be made out of the politics, and that it would overshadow what the show actually is.”
What the show “actually is” is another sexy soap opera, using a mystery and time-hopping device to hook viewers. It’s fine, if nothing special, on that level, yet what the first season also does, reasonably effectively, is glancingly evoke echoes of scandals involving conservative/pro-MAGA political figures in the Bible Belt, who appear to adhere to the old adage “Do as I say, not as I do.”
On the LGBTQ+ news and entertainment site Pride.com, journalist Ariel Messman-Rucker drew a line from the show to the 2024 allegations regarding pro-MAGA politician and former Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler and his wife Bridget, a co-founder of the family values group Moms for Liberty. When Ziegler was accused of rape, the investigation revealed the couple engaged in threesomes with other women despite their outspoken anti-gay views.
Closer to Texas where “Hunting Wives” takes place, State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione admitted to having an affair after a former stripper went public with allegations he paid for several abortions during their nearly two-decade relationship. Elsewhere in the Lone Star State, Trump loyalist, attorney general and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton was apparently accused of infidelity when his wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, announced that she was filing for divorce “on biblical grounds.”
Such stories aren’t any newer than the genre of TV and movies that explore dirty little secrets in outwardly idyllic small towns. In fact, watching “The Hunting Wives” brought to mind a similarly flavored Netflix show set in Georgia, “Insatiable,” which focused on an overweight 17-year-old girl who shrinks down to beauty-pageant-queen size after having her jaw wired shut.
Trashy, sex-crazed and filled with twists, the 2018 dark comedy landed with a dull thud — savaged by critics before getting canceled after two seasons — partly due to its treatment of obesity, though Netflix’s uneven run of shows featuring teenagers at the time was likely a factor.
Separating success from failure in television is best conducted with the benefit of hindsight, and it’s fair to say “The Hunting Wives” might have come and gone with scant notice had it premiered on Starz. Still, the abundant buzz suggests the show connects on a few different levels — straddling a line by serving up titillating small-town lust while name-checking hot-button issues for the terminally online, allowing them to pretend they’re watching because the show has something to say about the state of the nation.
In a later episode, Sophie presses Margo about whether she engaged in naughty behavior out of some deep psychological need, having missed the chance to sow wild oats in high school. Margo offers a simpler explanation: “Because it’s fun.”
As delightful as it is to take aim at red-state hypocrisy, the appeal of Netflix’s latest series to grace its “most popular” tier probably isn’t a whole lot more complicated than that.
