The Hunting Wives Review: A Wild Ride of Desire, Secrets & Power on Netflix

In the third episode of Netflix’s The Hunting Wives, Sophie (Brittany Snow) comes up with a hunch about why her gorgeous new best friend, Margo (Malin Akerman), might be sleeping with a man who is too young for her. Sophie thinks that Margo might perceive the affair as a second opportunity, a way to relive her lonely and poor high school years.

Margo listens quietly and even agrees with Sophie that she might have a point. But that’s not the true reason, she says. She does what she does just because she wants to, “because it’s fun.”

Margo and her series have a similar driving idea in that way. The Hunting Wives always puts hot moments ahead of smart plots or complex characters, and juicy surprises before of deep emotions or huge concepts. If it weren’t so funny, it would be really aggravating.

Rebecca Cutter made The Hunting Wives based on May Cobb’s book. It’s a mystery thriller that starts with a young woman walking through the woods while gunshots ring out around her. But in the three hours sent to critics (of an eight-part season), it is first and foremost a soap about how bad East Texas socialites are.

Sophie, a former PR expert who has just moved to this closed-off world from Boston with her architect husband Graham (Evan Jongkeit), is our way in. At first, she stands out like a sore thumb since she doesn’t like guns, has a simple East Coast style (Graham calls it “a little Soviet”), and her watery blue eyes give off a general air of uneasiness.

But Sophie catches Margo’s attention after a strange meet-not-quite-cute that has Margo taking off her clothes in the bathroom while Sophie tries really hard not to look. The queen bee, who is also Graham’s rich boss’s wife, Jed (played by Dermot Mulroney), quickly welcomes Sophie into her restricted group of cruel females who party hard and carry guns. When Sophie asks them innocent questions about their jobs, they laugh and say, “Work?” We don’t have jobs. We wife!

On a different, “classier” sitcom, the chemistry between Sophie and Margo could grow into a turbulent friendship or take a few episodes or even seasons to become sexual. The Hunting Wives, on the other hand, never leaves anything as subtext that it might transform into bold text right away. Akerman makes it seem so good that Margo literally purrs as she cuddles up to Sophie, pretending to teach her how to shoot or trying to get her to play spin-the-bottle. Snow, on the other hand, reacts with confused curiosity or barely restrained longing.

And they’re not the only ones who are getting hot and bothered. Jed is okay with Sophie and Margo’s new relationship since he likes to share his wife’s toys. Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), Margo’s best friend and current sidepiece, doesn’t like it. For now, Margo’s high school boyfriend Brad (George Ferrier) doesn’t know about it. He has a girlfriend named Abby (Madison Wolfe) who is more age-appropriate for him. Abby’s pastor, Pete (Paul Teal), has also been paying interest to her, which isn’t very innocent. And so on and so on. When the people of Maple Brook aren’t having sex with each other in public, they are flirting, masturbating, or planning revenge on their sexual competitors.

The Hunting Wives don’t take any of this very seriously, which is what you might expect. There are stakes, but not many. Margo and Jed are very powerful because they are very rich (he is thinking about running for governor of Texas, even if she is not sure about it). But they are also easy targets for extortionists and muckrakers. Sophie is weak because of a horrific history that she can’t manage to escape, even from halfway across the nation. Then there’s the death that is promised in the first few moments, which may make the show darker and sadder. It’s worth noticing that the third episode, which deals with it most directly, is also the one with the least amount of seductive bullshit.

The series is mostly not about making us feel or think deeply. Instead, it’s about satisfying our voyeuristic desire to see beautiful rich people act very, very badly. These people do this in spades, swinging between unbridled lust and white-hot rage like a lizard brain. The Hunting Wives has some funny jokes (I laughed when Brad groaned, “Abby, it ain’t my heart” when his religious girlfriend interrupted a make-out session to pray that God take desire out of their hearts), but I mostly laughed at how ridiculous it was and how it didn’t care about being coy.

The Hunting Wives stand out because they don’t pretend to be someone they’re not. Some red-state dramas, like Netflix’s Ransom Canyon, would avoid using adjectives like “liberal” or “conservative,” but this one doesn’t hold back: Sophie is a Democrat who calls her new frenemies “little Marjorie Taylor Greens” behind their backs. They are vociferous Republicans who say she presumably thinks of them as “deplorables.” It’s true that no one on either side of the aisle really lives up to their stated principles. For example, even anti-NRA Sophie quickly warms up to the joys of owning a gun. But it’s smart to point out that political affinities, both in Maple Brook and in the real world, are often more about culture than strongly held convictions.

If shows like Netflix’s Pulse want you to fall in love with the characters as much as they do with each other before letting them kiss, The Hunting Wives doesn’t care about things like true love or waiting for anything good to happen. Most of its unlikable and hard-to-relate-to characters don’t seem like they could handle real romance, only the kind of all-consuming horniness that may make them risk everything for a blowjob.

And whereas HBO’s Succession and other high-minded dramas can have trouble reconciling their lofty thoughts about how extreme riches can be harmful with their more base pleasures of wealth-porn, The Hunting Wives doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s just here for a good time. You can tsk-tsk their greed later, but for now they’re just here to act out for your pleasure.

It’s very unlikely that anyone will think The Hunting Wives is the most serious program of the summer, and definitely not the nicest. I don’t think anyone will say it’s the smartest, but the fact that so many bubbly soaps fail completely should show that it takes a lot of brains to develop something this stupidly fun. But I think it will be hard to beat Margo, Sophie, and their friends screwing and backstabbing their way through Maple Brook, all the way to a terrible finish.