Culture wars come to Netflix in sapphic drama 'The Hunting Wives'

NBC News

3 days ago

In the grand tradition of shows with 'wives' in the title, Netflix's new drama 'The Hunting Wives' is a salacious soap centered on women behaving badly. But something is noticeably different in this east Texas town, where the wives of a conservative gubernatorial candidate, county sheriff and local megachurch reverend carry guns in their handbags. And despite their supposed traditional values and MAGA politics, several of these women are engaged in extramarital affairs — with each other.
Based on the novel by May Cobb, creator and executive producer Rebecca Cutter's 'The Hunting Wives' expands on the original's 'Single White Female' premise, transplanting Brittany Snow's Sophie from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to an NRA meeting upon her red-state arrival with her architect husband, Graham (Evan Jonigkeit). A former 'political publicist' on the Democratic side, Sophie immediately escapes to the bathroom for a Xanax and meets Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), the captivating, uninhibited wife of Graham's new boss and would-be politician, Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney).
Moral posturing is the name of the game down in this Texas town, where everything is bigger — including the charades. Most headlines about 'The Hunting Wives' revolve around Akerman's larger-than-life Margo, who, even in a bad wig, entrances Sophie alongside the rest of her legion with her feminine wiles and flirtatious attention. She and Jed have an 'arrangement' ('Open marriages are for liberals,' she tells Sophie). 'I don't sleep with other men, and if Jed and I see a girl we like, we go for it.'
But Mrs. Banks isn't one for rules, so she's having dalliances with more than just whom her husband agrees to, and Sophie drops her liberal convictions to be with Margo quicker than she can unhook her bra. Soon enough, Sophie is keeping secrets from her husband, just like the rest of the wives, until the murder of a local cheerleader threatens to blow everyone's carefully manicured covers. Of course ethical nonmonogamy and sexual fluidity exist in Texas (the bi-curious, membership-based Skirt Club has regular events in Houston, Dallas and Austin), but unlike the 'deplorable' coastal elites, the residents of the fictional town of Maple Brook wouldn't dare bring up that kind of thing in polite conversation.
Hypocrisy abounds in 'The Hunting Wives,' which debuted at No. 3 on Netflix last week with 5.2 million views and climbed to No. 1 on the platform's U.S. Daily Top 10 chart. With all of the attention the show is receiving, viewer reactions have proved feverish, with fans across party lines gamely questioning their sexuality after witnessing Margo's effects on Sophie (as well as Callie, another friend and sapphic lover who gets jilted once Sophie comes to town). The bisexual (emphasis on the sexual) nature of the show has been a central focus of most reviews and fan commentary, but, interestingly, there's much less homophobic reaction than there is criticism of Margo's secret affair with the 18-year-old son of her friend and the local reverend. Viewers, conservative and liberal alike, are majorly invested in the world of 'The Hunting Wives.' It's Margo's world, from Reddit threads to TikTok hot takes, and we're all living for it.
Akerman has been feeling the love for her deliciously duplicitous character and said she finds Margo's contradictions are ultimately representative of humanity more broadly.
'I think that we people have a certain vision of how society works and marriage works and how we should be and what's asked of us,' she told NBC News. 'This [show] tests those boundaries. Absolutely, I feel like humans are fluid people. We don't need to be put into one category, and I think it's OK to slide that scale and ask yourself and be whatever you feel like being, instead of what people tell you to be.'
Cutter, the creator and showrunner, said she wanted to play with paradoxes, toeing the line of satirizing the conservative culture of 'The Hunting Wives' without full-on vilifying the characters, a plight somehow achieved even when they're murdering people. Cutter points to Sophie as the resident liberal breaking her own moral code to be with Margo.
'She's not exactly somebody who's standing up for what she believes in either,' Cutter said. 'So there's hypocrisy and bad behavior on both sides.'
On 'The Hunting Wives,' women having romantic and sexual relationships with one another is unspoken bad behavior. Although Jed doesn't mind his wife's sapphic leanings, his decision to run for governor requires a new kind of discretion and restraint that puts more sanctions on Margo than it does for his predilection for threesomes. Margo is key to his public persona as a good ol' boy with a classic Christian wife, and though no outright anti-gay utterings are made alongside disparaging mentions of abortion and immigration, Cutter said the homophobia was intentionally unspoken but implied.
'In the Christian world, there's going to be a level of 'that's not OK,' which everyone is then transgressing,' Cutter said. 'I think in that line, 'Open marriages are for liberals,' it's like we're coding it differently, even if the actions are the same.'
As heightened as it is, 'The Hunting Wives' reflects a very real population, which may be uncomfortable for some viewers struggling to find the fun in engaging with characters whose personal lives differ from their political motivations. On the other hand, men have been rewarded several times over for playing antiheroes on screen without the same kind of scrutiny that has some reviewers calling the series 'vulgar' or challenging its ability to be referred to as a 'queer show.' It may be frustrating to acknowledge that people's sex lives don't always align with their public personas and voting habits, but 'The Hunting Wives' confronts the ways in which sanctimony is frequently a cover for self-destructive secrets — and neither political party has a monopoly on that.
Conservative, gun-toting Texas provides a solid setting for a series like 'The Hunting Wives' to toy with conventions — which ultimately makes it enjoyable for most viewers to enter for eight fun and sexy episodes.
'We're so polarized as a nation,' Cutter said, 'and it's not a serious show. So I think ultimately people just enjoy the ride.'
Having enjoyed success just two weeks into its debut, fans are hopeful a second season is imminent. Would there be a world in which an openly gay 'hunting wife' joins the ranks? Cutter said she hadn't thought about it: 'That's a great idea.'