‘The Hunting Wives’ Is a Sexy but Superficial Portrayal of Small-Town Texas

By Sydney Rowell

Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

From “Big Little Lies” to “The Perfect Couple,” we love watching beautiful, wealthy women misbehave. “The Hunting Wives,” still one of Netflix’s most-watched shows more than a month after it first premiered, takes this misbehavior in a new direction. This eight-episode series builds momentum as a Red State-Blue State drama set in a fictional east Texas town, but quickly softens into a lusty murder mystery where nudity supersedes politics in screen time. “The Hunting Wives” is no Hallmark small-town romance – it made headlines for its affairs, orgies, and raunchy sex scenes. And while the show makes heavy use of familiar stereotypes, it aims to prove that rural living can be just as scandalous as life in the big city.

The show’s main protagonist is Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow) a fish-out-of-water liberal who moved to the fictional town of Maple Brook from the northeast with her young son and politically apathetic husband. Viewers experience the town – and its politics – through Sophie’s eyes as she acclimates to her new life. In the show’s pilot episode, Sophie and her husband attend a National Rifle Association (NRA) fundraiser hosted by her husband’s boss, where viewers are treated to lingering shots of Sophie staring wide-eyed at guests in formal attire with guns strapped to their sides. The first few episodes touch on hot-button issues, with an early storyline even depicting the town sheriff plotting to frame an undocumented immigrant for a murder. While the portrayal of small-town Texas borders on caricature, the backdrop of conservative America is key as the series explores the lives and influence of wealthy matriarchs in this tight-knit community.

The most important of these matriarchs is Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), the socially cunning and sexually fluid housewife of oil tycoon and gubernatorial candidate Jed Banks. She leads a posse of thin, wealthy, almost entirely white women, who are more than just stereotypical Southern Belles and housewives.

The members of the titular clique are anything but demure. They loudly and proudly tout their political beliefs, throw back tequila shots, socially maneuver for their families, and have sex with other women. While identifying as devout Christians, the hunting wives commit more sins per episode than a person could count. They lie, they cheat, they commit adultery, and they kill. Repeatedly.

But despite these breaks from tradition, it’s worth noting that the hunting wives themselves do not hold formal positions of power. They are simply married to the men who do: the sheriff, the gubernatorial candidate, and the pastor at a local megachurch.

Bad Girls

The explicit portrayal of bisexuality among Christian Southern matriarchs feels distinct from similar stories set in fictional small towns. But while the show is inventive in its depictions of the wealthy, it leans into shallow stereotypes of lower-class rural characters. Margo’s brother is portrayed without nuance as “trailer trash.” On the other (equally stereotypical) hand, the only other lower-class family, the Jacksons, are romanticized as inherently virtuous, seemingly capable of keeping their faith-based moral high ground no matter how much dirt is kicked in their faces.

The Jackson family’s genuine religious beliefs and inherent goodness are starkly juxtaposed with the wealthy families’ tendencies to continuously betray their supposed religious ideals. But the show doesn’t necessarily treat such goodness as an asset. It seems to suggest the Jackson family is too true to their beliefs to keep pace with the complex social politics of the town, which prevent them from ascending out of their current socioeconomic situation. Without money to throw around or a highly-connected network, the Jackson family struggles to obtain justice for a horrible crime.

The series certainly is not winning an Emmy for its groundbreaking portrayal of rural America. But unlike most media in a similar setting, it at the very least defies conventions by showing Christian and conservative women getting down to business with one another, in quite explicit fashion.

Did I mention this show is NSFW?

You can watch The Hunting Wives on Netflix. 

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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