Surgeried, plastic-perfect women, sex, secrets, and friendships that obliterate and reconcile within days? So far, so Desperate Housewives, but The Hunting Wives are a different breed. For a start, there’s significantly more guns, death, and a good dose more fiction than the beloved housewives’ reality series.
A classy cast elevates this mystery thriller above the purely sudsy soap opera that a synopsis suggests. Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect, John Tucker Must Die) is on point as protagonist Sophie O’Neill, uprooted with her son Graham and toddler Jack from Boston to East Texas with its expansive, multimillion-dollar real estate. The houses are ornate and excessive, but they look subtle in comparison to the women of East Texas: socialites with surgically perfect noses and motionless foreheads, endless lines of credit, and a dangerous boredom that brews up all sorts of risky behaviour.
Out of her depth, and keen to fit in, Sophie befriends the wife of her husband’s new boss, Margo Banks (Malin Akerman). Banks is a member of the Hunting Wives, a secretive clique of hard-partying, gun-toting women who have never met an illicit drug or trigger they’re not ready to get their fingers wrapped around. It’s a world apart from Sophie’s safe, solitary life in which social media scrolling is her sole daily exercise.
The series is based on May Cobb’s 2021 novel, which is a much soapier, sexier version of The Great Gatsby, in which there’s a dance between two people of vastly different wealth and societal circles that simmers with envy, jealousy, sexual desire and facades.
Margo is Gatsby, a flagrantly gorgeous, preened-to-perfection starlet of her own show. Her self-destructive tendencies are seductive to a woman who has repressed her own reckless desires to succumb to being a textbook-good mother and a humble housewife. While there’s a good dollop of Desperate Housewives (both the Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria vehicle and the reality series), The Hunting Wives exists within the realm of classic mean girl dramas like Heathers, Jawbreaker, The Craft, and—well—Mean Girls.
At heart, the fundamental question is: what sacrifices will a moral, ordinary woman make to be loved and wanted? And when those borderlines are crossed, can you ever repair the damage done to the people you hurt?
When a dead girl’s body draws police and media attention to their town, Sophie can’t deny the deadly extremes that her new friends will go to, and to question how responsible she may be for a murder.
This whole series is a vibe from go to whoa. It doesn’t hold out for later episodes to throw viewers in the deep end of these women and their volatile, intense lives. The first time Sophie meets Margo, the latter is in her bathroom looking for a sanitary pad. As Sophie—a stranger—looks on (the wife of her husband’s new colleague no less), Margo drops her entire dress so she’s baring merely a G-string and proceeds to pad her underwear with toilet paper. Boundaries: who needs ’em?
But there’s more to the hardcore partying these East Texan women indulge in, and which Sophie is soon immersed in. It’s not merely reckless, orgy-filled wildness. It’s almost a cult, and Margo wields her power with absolute, charismatic confidence. The stakes of keeping their secrets are raised substantially when Margo’s slimy, sleazy husband Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) decides to run for Texas Governor.
Right before convincing teetotaller Sophie to guzzle liquor and do donuts in an empty carpark, Margo inducts Sophie into this dangerous circle: “I’ve only got two rules: trust me, and do everything I say.”
In the spirit of twisty, macabre mystery Gone Girl, we’re compelled to keep questioning what we think we know about who each character is, their motivations, their allegiances, and the truth of what we’re seeing and assuming. Take Callie as a prime example. Nobody is more devastated by Margo’s shifting attention than the big-haired, short-skirted policeman’s wife. Jaime Ray Newman, who portrays Callie as the ultimate woman scorned, will be familiar to fans of Dopesick or Little Fires Everywhere.
The politics and shifting loyalties between particular women in The Hunting Wives is more convoluted and juvenile than high school, and yet, adult women know the truth of friendships. There’s always an ocean of history and emotions under a seemingly smooth surface, and often women trust their friends with their innermost, devastating secrets. For Callie, Sophie explodes a perfect constellation of wild women, and bumps Callie from the Sapphic dance that had previously existed between Margo and Callie (a friendship with benefits, if you will).
The greatest appeal of this series is watching these monstrous, but captivating, women connive to bring one another down and to observe the disturbing psychology of these co-dependent women erode their lives and their sanity. Who will survive, and what will they have sacrificed even if they make it out?
