5 Ways to Overthink The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
Spoilers ahead for the entirety of season two of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, including the finale.
Let it never again be said that reality shows need alcohol to be absolutely, unreservedly out of control. Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is notably dry — because of Mormonism but also because the cast members keep getting pregnant — and yet at the same time, its recently released second season is so chockablock with dramatic turns that it would be entirely reasonable for a sirens-blazing cop car to pull up at least once every episode. (Instead, that happens only once.)
Lots of shows in this space have drama, though. Bravo has made an entire kingdom out of yearslong feuds, mostly between women, so brutal and bizarre that it’s a wonder SUR doesn’t have a plaque outside like the kind used to memorialize Civil War battlefields. And yet the appeal of Mormon Wives is not just that they bring a “salt of the earth” approach to events like baby showers and Friendsgivings. It is also that every one of their arguments and allegiances is a rich cultural text, sometimes in about seven different ways at once. Each fight is like a graduate thesis in the making, about ideologies and cultural norms and the practice of community belonging in a digital era. They deserve to be thought about. They deserve, frankly, to be overthought about, because overthinking Mormon Wives reveals just how many different shows are tucked away inside this lifestyle reality program/Poppi-sponsorship vehicle.
1. This show is about the cult of American maternity. Not to get all political right away, but every single frame of this series as a whole, and this season in particular, is colored by the inescapable pressure of fertility and reproduction at all costs. Jen Affleck’s story in season two is the most obvious touchstone here: Unexpectedly and unhappily pregnant again, she decides not to leave her man-child husband, Zac, and immediately spirals into a perinatal depression so debilitating that she can no longer function and producers decide to stop filming her mid-season. But the looming cloud of pregnancy and early motherhood is present throughout this show — one need only look at the completely bananas game of pregnancy roulette in episode nine. It’s shaped by some pretty blatant and effective editing manipulation, allowing it to appear briefly as though at least one of the positive pregnancy tests is a true shock. The real shock of it is that this show takes place among a group of women, most in their mid-20s, most of whom already have at least a few children, and a game of pregnancy roulette would plausibly result in multiple positive pregnancy tests at the same time. It is the thing they cannot escape from, they cannot question, and they cannot treat as anything other than inevitable, even when the cost is so devastating that one of them can no longer be left alone in case she hurts herself. Too bad there’s no safe, swift, and highly effective medical procedure that might help!
2. This show is about feminism. More accurately, it is about #feminism, a thing all of these women claim to care about deeply. But it is a very specific interpretation of feminism, one mostly about the external expression of one’s social sisterhood and monetized female empowerment (via #MomTok, their TikTok dance?? collective???) while also conforming to highly policed strictures of heteronormative gender roles, motherhood, and, per episode six’s trip to Scottsdale, not skinny dipping when your husband says you shouldn’t. And yet it is also quite sex positive! Women should have lots of orgasms, including Layla, who has never had an orgasm with a partner! Everyone comes together to #support her on this journey.
3. This show is about the way social media has warped our ability to experience social intimacy. As the Great Taylor Paul No Comments on CMAs Post debacle of 2024 demonstrates, the fact that these women’s relationships take place through a series of cynical public performances on multiple fronts has fully warped their ability to trust one another. This crisis, an event sociologists will surely be unpacking for decades to come, is detailed beginning in episode eight, when it comes to light that Taylor Paul has been invited to attend the Country Music Association Awards. She posts a photo of herself on Instagram at said awards and then realizes that not a single other Mormon Wives cast member has publicly commented on that post. This becomes fuel for a spiraling breakdown, for Taylor and for all the other women, full of DMs and text-thread images shown on-camera as evidence of various hypocrisies. Not a single one of these people understands what an appropriate or a necessary social engagement looks like. And because their digital personas are also their brands, they have no way to distinguish between their business-digital selves and their intimate-personal selves, and so everyone screams at one another endlessly!
4. This show is about the mind-boggling contours and contradictions of modern Mormonism. Discussions and arguments about what counts as acceptable Mormon behavior is alllllll over this series. Jen and Zac are doing ketamine because their LDS Church has not banned it yet (unlike coffee). No one can talk about abortion. All of MomTok is obsessed with feminism, but the group defines that word in a way that would barely conflict with the guidance of Phyllis Schlafly.
But there are two scenes on this topic that feel especially noteworthy. First, the Great Mormon Bake Off section of episode seven. Mikayla gets dinged because the Jesus on her pie is too sexy. Mayci presents peanut-butter bars with a tiny diorama of Joseph Smith discovering the golden tablets on top. And yet somehow Demi wins for a cake covered in tiny candy penises, because she’s here to prove that Mormonism is not against sexual pleasure, even though she also has to call it a “Better Than What” cake because calling it “Better Than Sex” is apparently a bridge too far.
The second scene that requires mention in this category comes in episode nine when the women start chanting the recitation spoken aloud at every LDS Young Women meeting, which kicks off a whole discussion about how they sound as though they’re in a cult, the elements of the LDS faith they do and do not believe, and the exact mechanics of whether you are still “sealed” to your husband in the afterlife if you’ve gotten a divorce. “Can’t they have multiple eternal families?” Mikayla asks. “Yeah! Why?” Jessi asks. Ladies. You’re so close. You’re sooooooo close.
5. This show is about disguising the fact that the producers have selected one cast member on which to enact their most obvious moments of reality-show manipulation. Let’s look at the evidence. Who does not really have much of a story this season or at least not one that requires much interpersonal animus with the other cast members? Who required a sexually salacious personal-growth arc to seem interesting? Who showed up in New Orleans with a bag full of pregnancy tests and an out-of-the-blue decision to play pregnancy roulette? Who leaned in on the private plane, handed over her phone, and directed Taylor to scroll through every single group chat that Taylor is not in? Layla. It was all Layla.
Layla is a complicated case. She is the only person of color on the series. She is a divorced single mother. At 24, she is young even by the standards of this cast. She appears uneasy with the screaming-match style of interpersonal combat that’s necessary on a series like this. And at the same time, she keeps arriving in the middle of situations that seem designed to create drama between people she is not otherwise portrayed as having any close friendship with. If it were just the pregnancy roulette and the group chats, Layla might be suspicious but not obvious. But season two builds to the shocking discovery that Marciano, a cast member on Hulu’s Vanderpump Villa, may have had an affair with happily married Mormon Wives character Demi. Dutifully, Marciano himself arrives in the last several minutes of the final episode to clear things up: He didn’t sleep with Demi, but he did sleep with Jessi (also happily married). A lot. And who took it upon herself to track down Marciano and have this revealing conversation? You know who.
These are a good starting point, but they’re definitely not the only ways to endlessly overconsider this show. There’s also “Let’s Talk About the Aesthetics of Modesty,” and “#DadTok and Masculinity.” And when we finally get through all of that, we can settle in for the really important stuff: 4,000 Words on Layla Taking a Hit of That Joint.
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