The Hunting Wives brought old-school Skinemax to Netflix this past week, only with a higher caliber of actress and a Southern noir murder mystery. Like Jen, I had a lot of fun with it, despite its many, many flaws. Some are describing it as a sort of East Texas erotic Mean Girls with Hot Moms, which is not unfair. However, I like to think of the relationship between Brittany Snow’s Sophie and Malin Åkerman’s Margo as spiritual descendants of Winona Ryder’s Veronica and Christian Slater’s J.D. in Heathers. Margo is the chaos agent who sucks Sophie into her orbit, only for Sophie to realize, too late, that she’s in too deep.
It’s not a perfect comparison. But also, The Hunting Wives is not a perfect show. Plot-wise, it’s a bit of a mess, but the series does a decent job of papering over its many plot holes with sex scenes to distract viewers. The series is based on the novel by May Cobb, although there have been a number of changes, particularly in how it reframes the story as more of a murder mystery.
Arguably, the most significant change is the way the show uses the novel as a misdirect. The murder victim here is a teenager named Abby, and in the novel, it’s Jill — the mother of Abby’s boyfriend, Brad — who kills her. The series uses that twist as a sort of sleight of hand to obscure the true culprit, who turns out to be the most obvious suspect. It only kind of works, and it leaves more than a few head-scratching moments in retrospect.
Here’s the plot (or the gist of it): Sophie (Brittany Snow) moves from Boston to East Texas with her husband, Graham (Evan Jonigkeit), who will be working for Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), who is married to Margo (Åkerman). Margo takes an immediate interest in Sophie, much to the dismay of the East Texas Heathers/Plastics in her social circle. Margo convinces Sophie — who’s depicted as something akin to a coastal elite — to give up her sobriety, buy a gun, and go boar hunting with her and the ladies. One thing leads to another, and next thing you know, Margo and Sophie are messing around with 18-year-old boys and going down on each other. TEXAS! YEE HAW.
In addition to being married to Jed — who is running for governor on a guns-and-racism platform — Margo is having an affair with the sheriff’s wife, Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), Sophie, and Brad, the 18-year-old son of one of her besties, Jill (Katie Lowes). Jill is an uptight, super-conservative woman whose husband is the pastor of the local church. Her son Brad is a douchebag jock. Brad is dating Abby, a good Christian girl who lives on the other side of the socioeconomic tracks. Her mom is Starr (Chrissy Metz), the only decent person on the entire show.
The night that Sophie and Margo get drunk and mess around with Brad, his best friend, and each other, Abby loses it because Brad isn’t at a party where he’s supposed to be with her. At some point, she calls Jill to ask where Brad is and rages about his infidelity. Jill tells her to calm down and suggests they talk. That night, Abby is shot and killed in the woods near Margo’s property.
Meanwhile, at Margo’s house, Sophie wakes up the next morning after a night of heavy drinking with little memory of what happened. All she knows is that her gun is gone — and later, that same gun is connected to Abby’s murder. So, who killed Abby?
Because it’s her gun, Sophie becomes the prime suspect, though this is one of many logic-defying developments. The gun is recovered in a shootout in another city, but nobody does ballistics, checks fingerprints, or even attempts to determine how the gun got there. It’s just, “The gun is registered to Sophie, so she must have killed Abby.”
Sophie has no motive and, as far as we know, has never even met Abby. It’s clear she’s being framed, something hinted at by a mysterious man with an eye patch following her around. Sophie suspects the guy is doing opposition research on Margo and Jed. At the end of the series, the eyepatch guy is swapped out for another man, for reasons that are never explained — maybe to set up a mystery for a possible second season. Who knows?
Because the weak evidence, Sophie is released. But then she’s arrested again when a hunter’s trail cam out in the woods captures her arguing with Abby the night of the murder, another piece of contrived evidence that’s introduced and then later dismissed without explanation.
Eventually, police track down a youth pastor named Pete who had been stalking Abby. He also drugged and kidnapped two other girls. When police corner him, he kills himself. But Pete didn’t kill Abby — he was in a drunken stupor and in lock-up on the night she died.
Meanwhile, Jill is acting suspicious as hell. She’s colluding with her son to fabricate alibis, deleting GPS data, changing passwords, and intensely washing her car. The show leans hard into the possibility that she killed Abby, especially after it’s revealed that Abby was pregnant and had an abortion, something that would shatter Jill’s carefully curated Christian image.
Thanks to Sophie’s accidental misinformation, Abby’s mom, Starr, and Margo both piece together that Jill is the likely killer and confront her — Starr with a shotgun in hand. When Margo and Callie arrive, they find Jill has killed Starr. In the chaos, Jill pulls a gun on Margo, and Callie shoots Jill dead, assuming Jill killed Abby, knowing she killed Starr, and believing she’s about to kill Margo.
Case closed. Jill did it. The sheriff accepts it. Everyone moves on.
Except Jill didn’t kill Abby. Margo did. Sophie figures it out thanks to a box of tampons. Early in their friendship, Margo told Sophie she couldn’t use tampons. Later, when Sophie finds tampons in Margo’s bathroom, she Googles the implications and realizes it was Margo, not Abby, who had the abortion. Abby had discovered Margo’s relationship with Brad and threatened to expose it, which would’ve tanked Jed’s gubernatorial campaign. So Margo killed Abby and tried to frame Sophie.
Sophie confronts her. Margo admits it. But before Sophie can alert the police, or anyone, she’s attacked by Margo’s violent brother, Kyle. Sophie runs him over and pushes his body off a cliff. But before she does, Margo calls Kyle’s phone. Sophie inexplicably answers. She doesn’t say anything, but she breathes heavily. Margo recognizes it’s her. And that’s where the season ends.
To summarize: All the clues lead viewers to believe Jill killed Abby. But in the end, it was Margo — motivated by politics, lust, and self-preservation — who pulled the trigger. Sophie pieces it together thanks to a box of tampons, and just as she’s about to act, the show drops a cliffhanger and rolls credits.
And that’s the thing about The Hunting Wives: the twists are decent, the vibes are campy, and the acting is OK, but the ending collapses under the weight of its own contrivances. Instead of a tightly wound mystery, we get a finale strung together by red herrings, weak logic, and a last-minute tampon revelation. It’s a fun and sexy ride, but if you’re looking for narrative coherence, this one’s riddled with holes.
