The Hunting Wives’ mess, scandals, and southern sins

I recently finished the thriller series The Hunting Wives after two weeks of being pushed to the limits of my garbage adoration. The magnetic attraction of the horrible wigs, evil bisexual women, and horrible politics beckoned me to the edge of a cliff, which I quickly fell off. On my tumble down, I encountered treacherous rocks in the form of frenemies, Red State debates, and soapy melodrama unlike anything else released in 2025. I claim I can handle triteness, but I was tested.

The Hunting Wives chronicles former PR career-woman Sophie (Brittany Snow) as she moves to East Texas. This show is half HBO crime drama and half The Real Housewives, so obviously Sophie has a mysterious past which haunts her. And, of course, her secret is that she killed a person while driving drunk — a classic.

Sophie is thrust into a social hierarchy unfamiliar to the liberal life she left behind. Abortion is taboo, marriage is sacred, and all-American pastimes are mandatory. The Hunting Wives is quasi-political, poking bluntly at hot topics without letting them matter. So, Sophie’s anxious foray into this new scene is barbed with uncomfortable adjustments.

The crux of the series is Sophie’s immediate enamorment with wealthy socialite Margo (Malin Åkerman), the wife of a deceitful and NRA sponsored wannabe-governor. Despite living her life on the sidelines, Margo is magnetic, and a clique of equally deranged housewives with their own hidden agendas orbit her. Margo is always dressed in gold, has blindingly white teeth, and her face is contoured even if she just woke up. Sophie has a husband and young son to think about, but quickly changes gear into main character mode and makes the kind of choices you only find in by-the-pool-read books (this series is based on May Cobb’s novel).

Margo is the type of heinous but enthralling female character you usually only get in long-running soaps where characters have brain transplants so a new actor can take over the role. Margo borders on sociopathic, using her sex appeal as an effective weapon and her attention as a bargaining tool — she anchors the show in a dark mischievousness. She would have also fit right in as a villain on The CW’s Jane the Virgin. Åkerman’s performance is so-bad-it’s-good. It’s unclear whether she’s leaning into camp or believes The Hunting Wives is a titillating endeavor. Either way, she commits to a weird but pitch-perfect in context portrayal.

Sophie is the right kind of malleable and neurotic to be victimized by Margo’s gravitational pull and balayage wigs. She’s naive, a people-pleaser, and unsatisfied with her new housewife status after leaving her career behind to move for her husband’s (Evan Jonigkeit) job. Throughout the show’s eight hour-long episodes (it incorrectly thinks it needs prestige structure) we see a fly dive headfirst into a spider’s web, fully aware of its impending doom.

The Hunting Wives flirts with taboos constantly. I was stunned into silence or fits of giggles because of how ill-equipped the tone is to deal with subjects like pedophilia, suicide, sex work, and domestic abuse. Serious topics are cannon-fodder. It’s almost self-aware enough to not be offensive, but don’t expect a moral compass.

If there’s one thing The Hunting Wives has in abundance, it’s shock value. Perhaps the best example of this is when Margo goes to visit her friend Callie (Jaime Ray Newman, my MVP), who’s married to the town’s police sheriff. Callie has been hostile to Sophie and jealous of how close she gets to Margo. Seconds after walking through Callie’s door, Margo initiates a make out session which reveals that she’s actually having affairs with no less than three characters: Sophie, Callie, and her friend’s teenaged son (oh my). Multiple characters believe they have something special with her, which means none of them do.

The Hunting Wives also takes its sex scenes seriously; Åkerman’s nudity is so frequent, you expect Margo to drop her gown at some point in any given episode. The Hunting Wives obviously isn’t targeting the increasing numbers of viewers leaning away from explicit material. Credit where it’s due, Åkerman and Snow are dedicated to steamy intimacy that gives the show authority in its usually less-risky niche. Additionally, suspension of disbelief hinges on Åkerman’s ability to own who Margo is. If an actor without that confidence in the risqué scenes had been hired, nothing would have come together how it needed to. 

There’s a fun juxtaposition between watching characters perform their perception of wholesomeness and feminine decorum while Margo is just one friend away from developing a polycule only she knows exists and Callie is at home pegging her beefy husband.

The show takes a hard turn into murder mystery when a young girl is shot dead in the woods near Margo’s lake house. The characters are untrustworthy and irresponsible, so the mystery works because any one of them could have pulled the trigger. The only perspective we should be able to trust is Sophie’s, given she anchors the story. The writers deftly jump this hurdle by having her trip balls and pass out on the night of the murder, meaning she could have done it and forgotten. Of course, she can’t give the police her alibi because she was at the lake house on the night in question playing spin the bottle with Margo and two high school boys.

The Hunting Wives could have been a ‘yass queen, blow up your life’ story, if not for the lack of moral integrity on display. You can’t ‘yass queen’ these women, as much as you might want to. The point of the shenanigans and treacherous ensemble seems to be pointing out the hypocrisy and facade of Red State elites, who condemn hordes of people for their apparent sins while hiding their own.

Showrunner and writer Rebecca Cutter clearly has an interest in Real Housewives archetypes, from the way these kinds of women present themselves aesthetically to the problematic behaviors they’re associated with. Cutter explained in an interview with New York Post, “I wanted to do an exploration of women behaving badly, unapologetic sexual conquest running rampant.” She also said regarding the age gaps in sexual relationships, “I have single friends [who are] women of a certain age… young men always are interested in them… that is a very real thing. And so, I think that that’s cool to show.” That latter quote sums up the series’ blunt, unapologetic approach aptly.

The costumes, hair, and makeup often look deliberately cheap, as if trying to portray the group as behind on trends in both socio-political ways and in their fashion. They have modern phones, but wear skinny jeans you’d see on mid-2010s television — maybe commentary on the real life, insular Republican women its characters are based on. Either way, the true-crime flavor of the aesthetic mixed with the camp social dynamics and melodrama make the tone challenging to pin down. The Hunting Wives has a veneer of high production value draped over questionable acting and writing – so, a streaming show.

Despite pearl clutching and poor critical reception, The Hunting Wives captured people’s attention and was Netflix’s most-watched series in the U.S. through July 28 to August 3, 2025, logging 1.58 billion viewing minutes. The plot ends with a cliffhanger and yet another murder, setting up more to follow. The finale also uses an eerie and self-serious ‘Walking After Midnight’ cover that hammers home just how identity-confused it is.

The final episode cements Cutter’s cynical point that we’re all pigs rolling around in the mud. By the end, Sophie is nearly as deranged as Margo, and everyone’s too messy to be idolized or a villain. To that point, The Hunting Wives is best enjoyed as the riot it is, and has to be seen to be believed.