Netflix’s The Hunting Wives Is a Perfect High-Summer TV Bender

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I only watch what is considered to be “low-brow” television. Sometimes other things slip through the cracks, but for the most part, I cannot bring myself to click on whichever show someone at Vulture is breathlessly recapping once a week. Usually, this means everything I tune in to falls into the reality category, produced mainly by the Bravo network. I was instantly taken with The Valley, a reality series (spun off from the very popular Vanderpump Rules) about late-30s and early-40s couples getting drunk and fighting with each other in various new-build Cape Cod-style houses that look to be furnished in the style of a luxe college dorm. I will still watch, but at some point the show took a turn, got too dark, and became depressing. We all like to watch unlikable people unravel for our entertainment, but cocaine addiction destroying a family feels like a bridge too far. I needed to try something new.

Ted Sarandos and the Netflix corporation crank out more content than a GRWM daily YouTuber. Like most things in life—and most platforms that deal in that kind of volume—their output is very hit or miss. But when my wife fired up The Hunting Wives, I dipped in with no context and was instantly hooked. The show, based on the 2021 novel by May Cobb, revolves around Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow), who uproots her life to move with her husband (Evan Jonigkeit) from Cambridge, Massachusetts to deep-red Texas. Once she lands in fictional Maple Brook, she’s soon pulled into a social circle of cowboy hat-wearing NRA-card carriers who love to go to church but also love to party. The leader of this crew is Margo Banks, played by former Bruce Weber model Malin Åkerman; the rest of the roster includes a ginger who’s married to the local police chief, the pastor’s wife, and other assorted ladies who lunch with nine millimeters in their Chanel bags.

The storyline is insane and involves the murder of a teenager. But the amount of lesbian sex between these women is staggering. Seemingly, everyone is fucking someone they are not married to. The police chief gets pegged. Banks has an ongoing affair with a hot high school senior basketball star. The wives take Xanax and do coke at a sprawling lake house. They go boar hunting. They spew right-wing ideology. It’s salacious, sleazy, stupid, and the perfect entertainment for high summer. Yes, it’s corny, but sometimes the most entertaining things are. If you are looking to shut down your brain, this is the show for you.

The Hunting Wives also falls into a burgeoning category of entertainment seemingly designed to appeal to—or at least dog-whistle at—the right. Yellowstone and Landman fall into this category as well, but The Hunting Wives is overtly about characters with gun-loving, Christian, anti-abortion politics. Netflix and the other streamers need all the eyeballs they can get—but if there’s any real right-wing messaging in this sexy, silly show, it’s hidden like vegetables in a delicious smoothie. The peanut butter and chocolate protein powder help you forget about the spinach, the same way that sapphic sex scenes help you forget that Jed Banks (played by the still-handsome Dermot Mulroney in a 10-gallon hat) is running for governor with some anti-immigration rhetoric. Netflix has found a way to make a trashy beach read into a perfect TV show that will appeal to all sides; I can only imagine what these messy MAGAs will get up to in the inevitable season two.