The Hunting Wives ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I, a proud devotee of the rambunctious, lust-filled, class-crossing bonkfest books by authors Jilly Cooper and Barbara Taylor Bradford – and the joyfully escapist TV adaptations they inspired – did not see where this series was going.
Here is Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow), a former Democratic campaign manager, and her architect twit of a husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit), four weeks into moving with their son to a MAGA Texas town called Maple Brook after leaving life, jobs and secrets behind in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This pitch perfect, eight-episode potboiler of trash TV begins with Sophie and Graham arriving at the party of her husband’s boss, a gun-loving, Stetson-wearing millionaire called Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) and his hot third wife, Margo (Malin Akerman), a woman who never met a rifle, sultry innuendo or figure-hugging, sternum-baring lamé dress she didn’t like.
Margo is also predisposed to removing said dresses at the drop of a hat, or, in this case, the arrival of Sophie into her mansion bathroom at the party, where Jed announces he is considering running for Texas governor.
Sophie, meanwhile, has been a picture of stark hesitation and nervous unsettledness on arrival. But something distant stirs in Sophie’s nethers on meeting Margo, who on dropping her dress and one of Sophie’s Xanax pills, looks her new quarry up and down and declares, “Why, I think this party just got a whole lot better.”
Sophie then meets Margo’s close circle of four friends, including devout Christian Jill (Katie Lowes) and the town sheriff’s wife, Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), who Margo is having a secret affair with, even though she and Jed are up to their hot tub jets with group sex sessions almost every night of the week. Keeping up?
We know there is something else afoot. The opening titles feature a blood-covered blonde woman running through a forest trying to evade gunshots unsuccessfully. Who is shooting her? Who is she? When the next shot cuts to Sophie, fidgeting in an Uber after a trip to Dallas to buy a black party dress (“It’s a little Soviet,” Graham declares), it’s fair to wonder, is it her?
Into this mix is Jill’s jock son Brad who is going out with Abby (Madison Wolfe) by pressuring her into sex, and Abby’s single mother, Starr (Chrissy Metz), who is fairly wary of the whole cool-lady gang and Brad.
The men in this series do not fare well. They’re either boorish, gormless, secretly abusive, thick as the Cuban heels on their cowboy boots or simple assholes. They’re also massively watchable. But do not doubt we are here to see the women, led by the cool, wild and enigmatic Margo, who is always one step ahead of what turns out to be a murder investigation.
The Hunting Wives, adapted from the 2021 book of the same name by May Cobb, is not a load of nonsense. It’s a big, beautiful pile of seething, heaving, emotion-teetering trash TV mastery where, yes, Texas men declare “Enough with your feminism” if their wife briefly notes an independent desire – and said women pull open said husband’s colossal trophy belt buckle while calling him “Daddy”.
But the meat of the drama is the outlandish but perfectly believable excellent female characters navigating multiple murders, blackmail, power plays, stifling husbands, secret histories and affairs with each other. It could buckle under all of it, but the show’s casting, writing, pace and twisty drama keep you hooked.
As Margo says as she seductively coaxes Sophie into driving late-night doughnuts in a car park. “Come on … live a little.”
The Hunting Wives airs at 9.05pm on Tuesdays on Nine, and is now streaming on Stan.
Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
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