‘The Hunting Wives’ review: Texas-set murder mystery replete with guns
In “The Hunting Wives,” a brightly configured murder mystery cum cartoon sex opera premiering Monday on Netflix, Brittany Snow plays Sophie O’Neil, newly arrived from Boston with husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) and prop young son to fictional Maple Brook, Texas, a rich people’s town somewhere in the vicinity of Dallas. Graham is an architect, seemingly — at one point he will say, “Soph, you gotta check out this joinery,” which, in the three episodes out for review, is as specific as that will get — who has come to work for rich person Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney) to build “the new Banks HQ.” What will happen in there is not said.
The O’Neils step into this world by way of a fundraiser at which Banks, who wants to be governor, is making a speech in support of the National Rifle Assn., highlighting the need for guns for “good people” to fend off “all sorts of evil sumbitches” and the “personas malos keep pouring in every day” across the border. This is as much of a platform as he will bother to have; plotwise, the point is that running for office may expose his swinging private life to public scrutiny.
Over the course of the party, we meet the major players: Jill (Katie Lowes) is married to Rev. Clint (Jason Davis), who runs the local megachurch; her son Brad (George Ferrier) — who would be named Brad — is an unpleasant slab of basketball-playing meat who is seeing, which is to say, trying to sleep with Abby (Madison Wolfe), a nice girl from the wrong side of the tracks. (Jill is against the relationship; Abby’s mother, Starr, played by Chrissy Metz, has her own reservations.) Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), second among the eponymous wives, is married to Sheriff Jonny (Branton Box); I’m not sure whether Jonny is his first or last name, but this does seem the kind of place where the sheriff would be known by his first. Supplementary wives Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry) are just there to make up the numbers.
Most important is Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), whom Sophie encounters in a bathroom where she has gone to take a Xanax for her social anxiety, and who, within seconds and not for the last time, is casually topless. Margo has no social anxiety.
She seizes on Sophie as fresh blood, or from some genuine connection, or because she recognizes in the newcomer the sort of person who needs a person like her, someone Margo can productively dominate to their mutual advantage. Margo immediately declares they’ll be besties — creating a rift with Callie, the current occupant of that role, who, radiating jealousy at every pore, is determined to get between them.
Sophie, Graham seems proud to announce, was once “a bit of a wild child … a party girl” who became a career woman — a political PR operative — and, for the last seven years, a full-time mother. He has a lightly controlling, “for your own good” manner, keeping her from drinking or driving — there’ll be a reason for that, you’ll have guessed — but before long, she will drink, and she will drive. “Two rules,” says Margo, getting her behind the wheel. “Trust me and do everything I say.”
Drafted into Margo’s world, Sophie is soon shooting skeet, and then, having bought her own guns, wild boar. I cite again the Chekhov dictum to the effect that a gun in the first act ought to go off in the second, but there are so many about here, and our attention so significantly drawn to them, it would be a shock if some didn’t fire — the only questions being which and when and whose, pointed at what or whom.
Developed by Rebecca Perry Cutter (“Hightown”) from May Cobb’s 2021 novel of the same name, the series offers a light dusting of political references — “deplorables,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, no abortion clinics “left to bomb,” negative mentions of feminism and liberals — that might as easily been left off in light of the insular fantasyland within which “The Hunting Wives” operates. (Did J.R. Ewing ever express a political opinion?) Given the context — liberal Northerners camped among conservative Southerners — one might have expected a “Stepford Wives” scenario, but this is something different. Within, or exploiting, their sociocultural limits (“We don’t work, we wife,” says Monae proudly), the women party heartily while the men, even when nominally powerful, come across as comparatively bland, uninteresting and distracted. Graham, who is very nice, can seem positively dim; “Take my wife, please,” he’ll happily joke when Margo rides up on a jet ski to spirit Sophie away from a family day at the lake.
The characters are types, but the actors fill them out well, and the dynamic between Margo and Sophie really is … dynamic. Margo is intriguing because she’s hard to figure. Like Sophie, she has a hidden past — when a mysterious figure at the local roadhouse (Jullian Dulce Vida) calls her Mandy, it makes her atypically nervous because, obviously, she was once called Mandy. She lies to her husband; she’s having sex with Brad, which just seems like bad taste. But there’s something authentic and genuine about Margo magnified by Akerman’s entrancing performance. Margo is a temptress, the devil on Sophie’s shoulder — but maybe the angel too.
Lest we forget, there’s a murder, which opens the show in a flash forward; the series catches up with it by the end of Episode 3. (It brings in Karen Rodriguez as Det. Salazar, which promises good things.) There’s also a briefly mentioned missing girl, which will certainly tie in somehow. But with only three episodes out of eight seen, it’s impossible to say where it’s all going — unless you’ve read the book, I suppose, but even then, you never know. What’s clear is that there’ll be more secrets to reveal, with skeletons tumbling out of every closet. And these are big houses, with plenty of storage.
