Summary
The Hunting Wives is proudly trashy and utterly uninterested in playing coy. The whole thing’s ridiculous, but precision-engineered to be impossible to stop watching.
The Hunting Wives, created by Rebecca Cutter and based on the book by May Cobb, wears its original destiny as a Starz show like a badge of honour. It’s streaming on Netflix now, but don’t let the trappings of a murder-mystery fool you. This is a much saucier, steamier show than your conventional Big N binge-watch proposition, less Untamed – although there’s a bit of that outdoorsy DNA here – and more Vida by way of a Trump rally. None of this is intended as a criticism, though depending on where you’re standing, it may well look like one.
But this is rather unashamedly a soap about East Texas high society first, a sexy drama second, and a crime thriller third, the latter almost incidentally, as if a young girl being hunted through the woods is merely an inevitable consequence of the sparks generated from rubbing the first two together. It’s ridiculous in many ways, including its plotting, characterisation, and political viewpoint, which would be more of a problem if it weren’t so precisely engineered to be impossible to stop watching.
The plot is kick-started by the arrival of PR whizz Sophie (Brittany Snow, The Night Agent, Someone Great, Hooking Up) and her meek architect husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) in Maple Brook, East Texas, on account of Graham’s new job working for wannabe governor Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney, Shooting Stars, Along for the Ride, Hamna). They’re Bostonian blow-ins who don’t get the local fashion, pastimes, or politics, but the language of lusty admiration is universal, so Sophie is immediately taken with Jed’s glamorous, promiscuous wife, Margo (Malin Akerman, The Sleepover, To the Stars), and is quickly encircled by her tight socialite circle of local housewives, almost all of whom are defined exclusively by who they’re married to, like Jill (Katie Lowes, Inventing Anna), the wife of the megachurch pastor, Clint (Jason Davis, Outer Banks), and Callie (Jaime Ray Newman, Dopesick), the wife of the local sheriff, Jonny (Branton Box, The Walking Dead).
The Hunting Wives is the kind of show that immediately introduces a lot of simmering subtext and complicated interpersonal dynamics, which is not unusual, but it’s also the kind of show that aggressively acts on them within an episode or two, which is. It’s often hilarious how fast little suggestions become overt plot points: a sexual relationship between Sophie and Margo manifests immediately, the identity of a murdered girl teased by the premiere’s cold open is revealed within the first couple of hours, an ill-advised firearm purchase becomes a key piece of evidence in less time than it would take to sign the ownership papers, and so on, and so forth. Everything in this show is explicitly designed to be as soapy and salacious as possible, not to necessarily make sense or be appropriately couched in emotional stakes.
This is not to say that there are no emotional considerations at all. Sophie is running from a complicated, traumatic past that has torpedoed her sense of self-worth and moral character, which makes her particularly vulnerable to the machinations of Margo, a woman for whom doing whatever is fun is a mandate for doing just about anything, even if it means subtly – and often sexually – manipulating everyone around her, including her friends, husband, and flings. Jed’s push for governor is a threat to several of her leisure activities, and the small matter of a murder – which follows the recent disappearance of a local girl; could they be connected? – only draws further unwanted attention.
Jaime Ray Newman, Brittany Snow, Malin Akerman, and Katie Lowes in The Hunting Wives | Image via Netflix
So, it isn’t like this stuff doesn’t exist, just that it’s of lesser concern than its facile value. One of Margo’s flings, for instance, is with her best friend, and another is with a young man barely out of diapers who happens to be the son of another friend. In a more serious, arguably classier drama, Margo’s proclivities for married women and barely-legal men would be interrogated, but this isn’t the kind of show that cares about such matters on their own terms. Instead, the more complicatedly salacious notes just blend into a smutty symphony that is expressly designed to be consumed at great speed and with a minimal amount of thought.
In this, if nothing else, The Hunting Wives is basically a masterpiece. It has a contagious lack of interest in being anything other than outrageous all of the time, and it doesn’t patronizingly linger on meatier issues or sociopolitical points to teach the audience a lesson. Sophie being an anti-NRA Democrat upon her arrival in Texas just means there’ll be a line or two of errant dialogue before she purchases a gun. The fact that open marriages are deemed “for liberals” and that the murder is immediately blamed on undesirables who slipped through the porous southern border are both played as jokes, not cautionary tales. The punchline is there to see – the liberal concept of an open marriage is completely indistinguishable from the one being described, and there’s zero evidence to support the idea of a migrant murder – but the audience doesn’t need to be ham-fistedly directed to it.
This is how The Hunting Wives is cleverer than it pretends to be. It understands how most people’s political beliefs, interests, private proclivities, and public personas are just cultural signifiers rather than deeply-held components of their character. Most people can be compelled to abandon their principles at a moment’s notice, especially if they’re at risk of reputational ruin, and this show just expedites the process for maximum dramatic value rather than teasing it out for the sake of believability. It isn’t some kind of Trojan Horse masterwork, but it is a show that knows exactly how susceptible we are to life’s baser pleasures.
It’s stupid, no doubt, and over-the-top and depth-averse, and across eight episodes it tells less a coherent story than depicts a demented fever dream, where a river of tequila with banks of crushed Xanax meanders through a MAGA hellscape of soapy delinquency. But you won’t be able to stop watching it all the same. You can wonder what that says about you when it’s done.
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