For most audiences, a show featuring a salacious stew of sex, scandal, and murder would be more than enough to warrant a days-long Netflix binge. Enter The Hunting Wives, a new series—based on the 2021 novel of the same name, by May Cobb—that has all of the above, with a healthy dose of political turmoil added to the mix. The result is a gossipmonger’s fever dream of high-stakes drama.
The eight-episode series, adapted for the screen by Rebecca Cutter, follows Sophie O’Neil (played by Pitch Perfect’s Brittany Snow), an East Coaster who moves down to the East Texas town of Maple Brook, a fictionalized version of Longview. She becomes ensconced in a crew of affluent housewives and gets sucked into their lavish, booze-fueled, sexually promiscuous lifestyle until, eventually, the body of a local teenager shows up in a nearby wooded area. Though the novel, at its heart, is a thrilling murder mystery, the television adaptation is also a spirited parable about the limits of personal belief in the face of charm and seduction.
Almost as soon as we’re introduced to the core cast, we’re introduced to their politics. In the first episode, Sophie, an ex-Chicagoan and a liberal, attends her first social event in her new town and is disturbed to learn that the gathering is actually a fundraiser for the NRA. Her husband’s boss, Jed Banks (played by Dermot Mulroney), is an aspiring politician, teasing a Republican run for governor. And Margo Banks, the beautiful, beguiling woman she just met in the bathroom? She’s actually the would-be right-wing first lady. Suddenly, Sophie looks around to find herself, as Rick Perry once put it, the lone “blueberry in the tomato soup.”
The NRA fundraiser, the governor’s race, Sophie’s beliefs—none of those are in the book, which tracks Sophie as she falls ever deeper into the web of her new circle of heavily accented conservative friends. If you read between the lines of the novel, you can surmise that Sophie—a lifestyle-magazine editor, rather than a political consultant, as in the show—voted differently from the group of skeet shooting, sharp-talking Texas women she becomes involved with after her move. Cobb leaves the women’s differences at the ballot box unsaid, with the characters’ conservatism implied by the rural Texas setting in which they live and their frequent use of firearms.
The adaptation makes the women’s political divergence more explicit in order to highlight Sophie’s arc from innocentish newcomer to a participant suddenly dug deep into a hole she can’t seem to get out of. Sophie is “this sort of fish out of water character, coming from a different place and entering as an outsider,” says Cutter, who spent time with Cobb while writing the story for television. “Some of the themes of the book are things that are very politically current, happening in Texas especially. So I didn’t want to shy away from that. Let’s lean into that, those differences and the culture shock.”
That culture shock—of a liberal from the Northeast confronting Southern conservatism—also underscores one of the driving dynamics of both the novel and the show: Sophie’s infatuation with Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), the conservative queen bee of the town’s social circle. Because Sophie “doesn’t have a super strong belief system of her own,” she gets easily sucked into the group’s orbit “because of Margo being this charismatic woman,” says Cutter. “It’s very easy for her to put aside what she thinks she believes at the beginning, because she’s having fun and it feels good. That’s a parable I was trying to make about people’s politics.”
The show is also—to put it bluntly—“horny,” says Cutter. “What I loved about the book was how naughty the characters were.” Cobb says that much of her work—which often concerns the affluent, oil-rich set of Longview, her hometown—is about “adults behaving badly,” a phrase that could as easily refer to sexual escapades as political scandals, which, in both The Hunting Wives and real life, are often intertwined.
The sexual forays of the show’s conservative characters underscore their hypocrisy—something Margo, at least, is self-aware about. After her husband, the governor hopeful, comes on to Sophie, she quips that open relationships “are for liberals.” Conducting extramarital affairs with the full knowledge of your husband, she implies, is the correct way to “cheat.” Likewise, Sophie is self-righteous: She judges the women for describing their occupations as “wives” despite being a homemaker herself, having left her career in order to focus her time on her husband and son.
Lighthearted asides keep the political aspects of the show from getting too heavy. In one episode, Sophie is invited to join a group supporting antiabortion activists. “We’re not gonna bomb clinics or anything,” jokes Margo. Jill, a pastor’s wife (played by Katie Lowes), follows up with a wry, ominous assurance: “Don’t worry, there aren’t any more around here. We made sure of that.”
These satirical punches—like Margo’s about open relationships—poke fun at the characters, and at all of us watching, who adhere to our beliefs with varying degrees of strength. The tongue-in-cheek lesson of The Hunting Wives is that no matter our political affiliations, we’re all just a few short lapses in integrity away from lies, adultery, or even murder.
For her part, Cobb approves of the political emphasis present in Cutter’s adaptation, and she hopes that the show’s portrayal—and soft skewering—of characters of all backgrounds can appeal to viewers on both sides of the aisle. “If there’s such a thing as a red-state viewer, if there’s such a thing as a blue-state viewer—and I think it’s more nebulous than that—[this show] appeals to both.”
The eight-episode series, adapted for the screen by Rebecca Cutter, follows Sophie O’Neil (played by Pitch Perfect’s Brittany Snow), an East Coaster who moves down to the East Texas town of Maple Brook, a fictionalized version of Longview. She becomes ensconced in a crew of affluent housewives and gets sucked into their lavish, booze-fueled, sexually promiscuous lifestyle until, eventually, the body of a local teenager shows up in a nearby wooded area. Though the novel, at its heart, is a thrilling murder mystery, the television adaptation is also a spirited parable about the limits of personal belief in the face of charm and seduction.
Almost as soon as we’re introduced to the core cast, we’re introduced to their politics. In the first episode, Sophie, an ex-Chicagoan and a liberal, attends her first social event in her new town and is disturbed to learn that the gathering is actually a fundraiser for the NRA. Her husband’s boss, Jed Banks (played by Dermot Mulroney), is an aspiring politician, teasing a Republican run for governor. And Margo Banks, the beautiful, beguiling woman she just met in the bathroom? She’s actually the would-be right-wing first lady. Suddenly, Sophie looks around to find herself, as Rick Perry once put it, the lone “blueberry in the tomato soup.”
The NRA fundraiser, the governor’s race, Sophie’s beliefs—none of those are in the book, which tracks Sophie as she falls ever deeper into the web of her new circle of heavily accented conservative friends. If you read between the lines of the novel, you can surmise that Sophie—a lifestyle-magazine editor, rather than a political consultant, as in the show—voted differently from the group of skeet shooting, sharp-talking Texas women she becomes involved with after her move. Cobb leaves the women’s differences at the ballot box unsaid, with the characters’ conservatism implied by the rural Texas setting in which they live and their frequent use of firearms.
The adaptation makes the women’s political divergence more explicit in order to highlight Sophie’s arc from innocentish newcomer to a participant suddenly dug deep into a hole she can’t seem to get out of. Sophie is “this sort of fish out of water character, coming from a different place and entering as an outsider,” says Cutter, who spent time with Cobb while writing the story for television. “Some of the themes of the book are things that are very politically current, happening in Texas especially. So I didn’t want to shy away from that. Let’s lean into that, those differences and the culture shock.”
That culture shock—of a liberal from the Northeast confronting Southern conservatism—also underscores one of the driving dynamics of both the novel and the show: Sophie’s infatuation with Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), the conservative queen bee of the town’s social circle. Because Sophie “doesn’t have a super strong belief system of her own,” she gets easily sucked into the group’s orbit “because of Margo being this charismatic woman,” says Cutter. “It’s very easy for her to put aside what she thinks she believes at the beginning, because she’s having fun and it feels good. That’s a parable I was trying to make about people’s politics.”
The show is also—to put it bluntly—“horny,” says Cutter. “What I loved about the book was how naughty the characters were.” Cobb says that much of her work—which often concerns the affluent, oil-rich set of Longview, her hometown—is about “adults behaving badly,” a phrase that could as easily refer to sexual escapades as political scandals, which, in both The Hunting Wives and real life, are often intertwined.
The sexual forays of the show’s conservative characters underscore their hypocrisy—something Margo, at least, is self-aware about. After her husband, the governor hopeful, comes on to Sophie, she quips that open relationships “are for liberals.” Conducting extramarital affairs with the full knowledge of your husband, she implies, is the correct way to “cheat.” Likewise, Sophie is self-righteous: She judges the women for describing their occupations as “wives” despite being a homemaker herself, having left her career in order to focus her time on her husband and son.
Lighthearted asides keep the political aspects of the show from getting too heavy. In one episode, Sophie is invited to join a group supporting antiabortion activists. “We’re not gonna bomb clinics or anything,” jokes Margo. Jill, a pastor’s wife (played by Katie Lowes), follows up with a wry, ominous assurance: “Don’t worry, there aren’t any more around here. We made sure of that.”
These satirical punches—like Margo’s about open relationships—poke fun at the characters, and at all of us watching, who adhere to our beliefs with varying degrees of strength. The tongue-in-cheek lesson of The Hunting Wives is that no matter our political affiliations, we’re all just a few short lapses in integrity away from lies, adultery, or even murder.
For her part, Cobb approves of the political emphasis present in Cutter’s adaptation, and she hopes that the show’s portrayal—and soft skewering—of characters of all backgrounds can appeal to viewers on both sides of the aisle. “If there’s such a thing as a red-state viewer, if there’s such a thing as a blue-state viewer—and I think it’s more nebulous than that—[this show] appeals to both.”
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