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The Netflix series The Hunting Wives is a soapy murder mystery full of nudity and intrigue, about a group of Texas women who are up to no good.
If you always thought Desperate Housewives would be better if more of the housewives were having sex with each other, this might just be the show for you.
I'm Linda Holmes and today we're talking about The Hunting Wives on Pop Culture.
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I'm delighted to say that joining me today is Katherine Van Arendonk.
She is a critic for Vulture and New York Magazine who writes about TV and comedy.
Welcome back, Katherine.
Hello.
I'm so excited to be here.
I know.
Also joining us is Christina Tucker.
She's the co-host of the podcast, Wait, Is This a Date?
Hello, Christina.
Well, howdy to y'all, let me say.
Let me say.
I know.
Oh, boy.
All right.
We're going to get into it.
The Hunting Wives begins with a woman named Sophie, played by Brittany Snow, who follows her husband from the East Coast to Texas for a job, working for a rich businessman and budding politician named, of course, Jed.
Jed is played by Dermot Mulroney, who is not Dylan McDermott.
Sophie is immediately enchanted by Jed's sultry wife Margo, played by Malin Ackerman.
Do you have a pad?
Um, I'm not sure.
Let me, let me check.
I have a tampon, thanks, but I can't use that.
She makes even that sultry.
That's what we're saying.
Margo's bestie, Callie, is a gun enthusiast and the wife of the local sheriff.
She is immediately suspicious of Sophie and jealous of Margo's interest in her.
Jill, played by Katie Lowe's, is the wife of the local preacher and dotes, sometimes uncomfortably, upon her teenage son, Brad.
But before Sophie is even fully settled into her new town, a dead body appears in the woods, and Sophie becomes highly motivated to figure out exactly how the intrigue among her new friends might be connected to that development.
The show is based on a book by Mae Cobb.
It's streaming on Netflix.
I do want to say before we get started, there's a lot of sex on this show.
We're going to talk about the sex on this show.
We're going to probably talk about some of the specific sex acts on this show.
So depending on your circumstances, where you're listening, just be conscious of that.
We just wanted to make you aware.
Christina, I am dying to know, what did you think about The Hunting Wives?
You know Linda, I'm going to have to give that a ye and also a ha, because I had a darn tootin' good time hanging out with the hunting wives.
I've always have a fondness for Malin Ackerman.
I think 27 Dresses was really like a formative... movie for me at that time.
Agreed.
I think similarly Brittany Snow as, like the late millennial I am, I'm always just like yep, those are two women I love to see getting work done.
I love to see them working together.
And I love to see them working so intimately together.
I would also like to say this show is so silly and over the top, but with the just a right amount of winks that you're like, thank you.
Thank you for spoon feeding this directly into my mouth.
Because I did need that.
Yeah.
I had a great time and I'm fist pumping for season two.
Yeah.
Let's go.
Absolutely.
Catherine, how about you?
Yeah, I had a very similar reaction.
I was trying to figure out how to describe the show and sort of what makes the show feel different, different than a lot of very similar shows that have come out in the last several years.
And they get described as like, it's like murder and soap and it's sexy.
And then you watch them and they just feel incredibly like everything about all of those elements have been dialed back and it feels very safe and very predictable.
And, like The Hunting Wives, is an actually satisfying and actually a little bit risque version of this show that, you see, made a lot.
And there's a scene that's a little bit late in the season.
And I'm not going to describe the exact circumstances, but like somebody is asked to describe a person who has done something to her.
They're like interviewing her about this perpetrator.
And she's like, He was a little angry and also horny.
And this to me, as soon as I heard this line, I was like, yeah, that's the show.
That's where we are.
It's perfect.
Yeah, actually true.
When I watched this, I had basically the same reaction.
But I was actually kind of interested in it as a genre piece.
I think you can legitimately say this is much more than similar things actually about female desire and is almost completely uninterested in not only male desire but most of the women's desire for men in this show is sort of unsatisfying to them or like not necessarily what they want, or it's kind of like dysfunctional.
Corrupt in some way.
And most of the women in this show find their most satisfying sexual relationships with other women.
I mean, that was my sense at least.
It's not that there aren't men having sex in this, but it's like there are even some times when you know women who are interested in having sex with each other kind of find their way to that by kind of putting like well, but it's really with these men, but it's not really us.
It's really, yeah, I was interested in how that worked.
Yeah, there was a lot of interesting, like actual queerness kind of baked into it.
I think there is kind of what's to be said about the character of Margot.
I think like she's kind of just approaching life with a very hedonistic approach.
I think kind of anything probably sexually is on tap for her.
But I do think, like the experience that Sophie has in her relationship with Margot and then with the relationship we learned she had once in her life later in the season, is really an interesting, like actual kind of conversation about like what she has repressed, what queerness maybe she's repressing.
Mm hmm. where that has led her in her marriage and also later her life.
You know, of course, I'm ha-ha-ing, I'm ho-ho-ho-ing, but I was also going, hmm, interesting.
Oh, hmm, okay.
Yeah, the way that the Sophie character is introduced is this very classic fish out of water.
She's like, I'm a liberal, I'm from Boston, I don't want to do with all these conservative women.
And then it turns out very quickly that she has all of these constraints that she has put on herself.
And it's not that the show is saying that sort of a liberal person or a conservative person like.
Actually, your expectations are wrong.
Like it's not trying to do a like, whoops, it's backwards.
It is instead of just much more complicated depiction of sort of Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
And this is has no interest in that math.
No, not at all.
Yeah, just none.
And I do think like something that made me feel like this was a cut above the ones that feel a little less satisfying is I hate to say it, but I think it's because of the body count.
I do feel like this show took death in a way that was like, this is serious and quite dark.
So I absolutely thought you meant body count in a Love Island USA sort of way to do.
But you mean death?
I mean, like the actual deaths.
I mean, I do think both body counts were important.
There's some death in it.
Yeah, there is some death in it.
And I feel like, at a time where I feel like we are walking towards like, this suggestion of like oh, all of these people are dead.
But like then we do like a JK.
Everybody's still alive.
It was kind of satisfying for a show to be like, nope.
Murders have been committed and that's happening.
I think that's right.
I was like yeah, you're just really sticking the landing in a way.
I think a lot of shows feel like they pull back from.
And even before landing, it feels like so many streaming seasons are like, we're gonna do it.
You're gonna watch the whole season and then the finale, something's gonna happen.
And you spend episode after episode just waiting for them to get to the part where it's fun.
Right.
And the hunting wives is like it's going to be fun for a minute.
To the other thing that Christina and I were texting about when we were first watching this show.
She was like, I'm going to turn it on.
And I was like, put on a timer and just see how long before you get to full frontal nudity.
It's going to be so, so short.
Yeah.
And I think it is really setting those expectations from the beginning.
But then doesn't just let that be like a fun thing.
It's like, great.
Every single episode, you're going to have something like that.
Yeah.
You get so used to reading these kinds of thrillers about women and their close friendship.
And you get to really, you know, be like the way she stepped between her legs when they were, you know, shooting a gun.
I bet that text really means something.
And then the show is like, it does.
Yeah.
Cut to the next scene.
Exactly.
Like, OK, gotcha.
Well, and you know we played that clip in the intro of Margo asking for a pad and them having a conversation about I have a tampon and all that kind of stuff.
And directly after that happens, Margo just kind of drops her dress so that she can stuff toilet paper in her underwear because she doesn't have a pad.
It is a kind of disarming frankness.
It's sort of like you have this thing of like.
Is that sexy?
If that's sexy, why is it sexy?
Like it's bracing, I think.
For Sophie the idea is just she's shocked by this because of the frankness of it Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
No.
It doesn't feel like it's just supposed to be like just everybody having sex with everybody else.
It's very often like the kind of sex that people are having is specific to the moment in the story, and what is the power relationship between these people?
What are they getting out of this sex scene?
What are they getting out of this relationship?
And I think like –
I don't necessarily believe in like all sex scenes should be as explicit as possible for the sake of being as explicit as possible.
But there are times when, when you distinguish between the different sex acts that people perform, sometimes that has something to do with what's going on between them.
And I think the show in a few cases like does make an argument for that.
Yes, there is pegging on this show in a way that got my living room of rowdy homosexuals to hoot and also holler.
And what was interesting about that scene?
Not only was it kind of like one of the first depictions I can really recall seeing, certainly on a Netflix program, but like certainly nothing that explicitly.
Right.
Right, because it's not just the act, it's also how much you can see and the way that it is shot.
The way that it's shot and that they don't cut away from the post of it.
There is a continuation of that scene that makes it feel lived in and not for shock value in a way, even though it is both shocking, not only because of the act but also because of the conversation occurring during the act, which is, in another way, great character development.
And it does tell you something you need to know more about like this couple.
Yeah.
It's like so silly, but also so interesting.
And that's like my favorite intersection of things when I'm like having a ball tee hee heeing.
And then I'm going, Oh, But interesting.
There has been in a lot of prestige television for many, many years, this conversation about the way that particularly HBO shows like Game of Thrones will add sex into scenes or there will be like exposition that's happening with sex in the background, as a way to be like see, you're learning about the world building, but also there's naked ladies always happening behind you.
And honestly...
If you were to tell me that this entire show were built as an elaborate joke on that idea and like a way of subverting the entire premise of like what if sex is just this way of catching your attention?
I mean, it is so much work to actually figure out why a character would be having sex the kind of sex that they are having in that moment, and how much information is too much?
Information like how much is a viewer's brain actually still going to be able to receive from a plot perspective while they are also watching the pegging?
It is really masterfully done, I think, in that respect.
I think the other thing about it is, as we were saying, it's unusual to see on a Netflix show.
This was not originally designed as a Netflix show.
It was originally meant to be on Starz.
And I do think that there is something on Netflix that...
Because so many shows look the same, not just sort of have the same structures and same patterns, but like the cinematography is very the same.
I noticed from the opening credits of this thing.
I was like somebody spent way more money on the credits of this than I feel like is typical for a Netflix show.
We watched the credits every time.
We were like, these bang.
That's right.
And like your eye wants something new after a while, you know, it's nice.
And I also feel like this aesthetic of sort of Texas or the West you know a lot of cowboy hats and stuff like that has become so hot right now.
And when I saw kind of like the key art for this and like read the basic description, I was like is this like Yellowstone with women?
And so I was pleasantly surprised that it doesn't fit. feel retro to me.
It doesn't feel like it's kind of longing for a different era of television.
It feels contemporary to me.
One of the other dynamics that I like the fact that it updates and you sort of alluded to this Christina, with the thing about when she steps between her legs hunting that probably means something.
It's so common to see these stories about women who become obsessed with each other.
And it's so rare to see that actually acknowledged as like that's probably because she's hot for her right.
There's a gay reason for the feelings that you're having.
As opposed to just like.
If you think about something like single white female or something like that, you'll see like the jealousy of the boyfriend and like they'll almost go there, but they won't quite quite go there in terms of like she's obsessed with this woman because she's so hot for her.
And I sort of like the fact that they just go ahead and they say okay, if you're going to do a story of like a woman's kind of, you know, becoming obsessed with and fixated on This woman that she meets who she's fascinated by, like the word fascinated has sometimes like, covered up so much.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think with this they're like yeah, like in the same way that if she was straight and it was a dude like you, would understand what it means that she's fascinated with him.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
I do want to say I do want to just fight Sophie's husband.
I don't know where he's at, but I don't really want to fight him.
I just want to push him into like a wet pile of leaves or something.
I just that guy.
I just.
Yeah.
Push me out, Prickerbush.
Yeah.
There are really not a lot of like super good dudes.
No.
In this show, I will say that.
No.
I mean, I'm always happy to see my King Dermot.
I'm just like, yeah, what are we doing?
And he's really good in this.
Yeah.
You're absolutely giving me that big text in.
He's Yeehan as much as I have in this episode.
You know, he's having a time.
Yeah.
He's a Jed who could only be a Jed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if I have a quibble, Margo is having an affair with a high school student.
I am over that as a thing that is treated as scandal rather than what it actually is, which is very dangerous and, you know, bad for people.
I think they kind of want you to think like he's 18, he's about to go to college.
But it's like I was over that when they did it on the WB shows of the Of the 90s and aughts.
I do not like that story.
I wish they had not done it.
Yeah, we could do something else there.
Just put him in college.
It's not that hard.
It's so much less weird if you just put him in college.
But other than that, for the most part, I think they navigate all of this like with a certain verve, and also certainly with verve, i would say it's like you said it's silly, but it's also like weirdly transgressive at times in a way that i appreciated.
You know yeah, i like when silly, like popcorn tv makes me think like 10 more than i need to, i think that's fun and i think that's interesting and the show gave me that and a lot of ladies having sex, which i love.
Yeah Yeah, it's the amount of thought that you can if you want, but don't have to take out of it.
And I truly just could not get over how much it was like.
This is how Taylor Sheridan shows think that they are plotted and are not right.
This is the kind of like density of betrayal and surprise that they believe that they are regularly providing.
And it is because there's this intense attachment often to needing people to be heroic.
This is not a show that has any kind of hang up about like, I need to have to root for these people.
It has totally discarded the shackles of relatability and is just all the way out in pegging zone.
So it's really delightful.
Yeah.
I think they did a decent job of leaving the door open for another season for themselves, without putting me in a position where I got to the end and I was like, after all, that you didn't give me anything.
Right.
It gave us questions.
It gave us answers.
And then it also was like, and if you had a couple of more thoughts, you could go this way.
And I was like, okay, that's fun.
Right.
The information matters, like whether or not it was a satisfying answer to those questions matters.
The pacing of the matters.
But the thing that soap operas know, and that so often streamers forget, is that it should be as interesting to watch people learn that information as to see the answer itself.
Yes, absolutely.
And how people understand, receive it, how it then spreads among the network.
That's the story.
Like the answer is not the story, and in particular, I wanted to just call out Brittany Snow's incredible ability to just have aghast facial expressions when she learns Her eyes are so big.
As a millennial, I have Brittany Snow being aghast, sort of etched into my brain.
She lives there.
So I know what's coming.
I know the expression.
And then you see it and you're like, she's just flummoxed.
She going to do it angry or she going to do it like overwhelmed this time?
And every time it's fun and satisfying.
It understands how to play to those beats.
Yeah.
And similarly, I will say Katie Lowe's who I've loved since Scandal.
Yeah.
It's just so fun to get to like watch her kind of do something that I was like wow, this like slightly Marsha Gay Harden-esque role for you.
I'm like, I'm loving it.
I'm loving it.
I mean, I think they're genuinely having a great time with the acting.
Yeah.
Sort of with these really like over the top doesn't feel adequate.
There are parts of it where it's just so ridiculous in a really enjoyable way.
And yet they kind of managed to pull it back now and then.
So you can actually feel like it's a person.
It's a human.
It has a humanity to it.
And I do think a lot of that is down to Brittany Snow and also Malin Ackerman who I think really has figured out this femme fatale erotic thriller lead thing.
Pitched perfectly.
And is really just playing the heck out of it.
And you see her...
Really going for it in certain moments and also kind of able to pull it back to that very cool.
You know Sharon Stone kind of like energy of iciness, but also sometimes this energy of over-the-top sexiness.
And I think she's great in this.
I had such a good time watching her in this.
Yeah.
I hadn't really seen her do this exact thing before and I was glad for her.
Good job.
Yeah, this is like a fun update on like a type of character that she often gets.
Like she's often, like you know, is hot, like as her character, but it's fun to give her like, a little more edge.
Love it.
Well, we want to know what you think about The Hunting Wives.
Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Catherine Van Arendonk, Christina Tucker, thank you so much for being here.
I would not have wanted to talk about The Hunting Wives with anyone else.
What a delight.
Thank you.
It was an honor.
This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Liz Metzger and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.
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