Photo: Kent Smith
Spoilers follow for the first season of The Hunting Wives, all eight episodes of which premiered on July 21 on Netflix.
After everything else the bawdy, tawdry, and perfectly ludicrous The Hunting Wives serves up in its first season, the series’s final act is an embarrassment of riches. Not one twist, but two! Not one femme fatale, but a pair of them! Finale “Sophie’s Choice” not only solves the season’s major mysteries, it also sets up a potential second season as melodramatic, satirical, and ostentatious as this one. As we impatiently await news of that next season, let’s break down the cliffhanger ending and how The Hunting Wives got there.
Originally green-lit by Starz in 2023, The Hunting Wives moved to Netflix after Starz and Lionsgate Television, which produced the series, broke apart. Still, The Hunting Wives feels guided by the Starz marketing tagline “We’re all adults here” — there’s more sex, blood, and betrayal in these eight episodes than in the same-named novel by May Cobb that the series is based on. And it’s fun! Remember what watching True Blood used to feel like? That’s the general vibe of The Hunting Wives, which starts off in Yellowjackets-esque fashion with a teen girl running from a pursuer through a forest who is eventually shot and killed. Then it flashes back to three weeks previously to introduce Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow), a 30-something woman clearly going through the motions in her marriage to the nice and boring architect Graham (Evan Jonigkeit). They’ve moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the small East Texas town of Maple Brook for Graham’s new job working for local businessman Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), and it’s a major culture shift for Sophie. She wears Birkenstocks, not cowboy boots, and she’s disgusted to learn that the first event they’re invited to at Jed’s house is a gung-ho fundraiser for the NRA. How is she going to survive in this place?
The answer arrives in the form of Jed’s wife, Margo (played with pitch-perfect tonality by Malin Åkerman), who is gorgeous and flirtatious and strips practically naked in front of Sophie the first time they meet, when she asks Sophie if she can borrow a pad. (Margo tells Sophie she can’t use tampons. Note this for later.) Margo is a magnetic queen bee, a woman who runs her social circle through a mixture of coercion and seduction, and Sophie’s immediately drawn to her. Their dynamic is not entirely unlike that of the upstart Nomi and established Cristal in Showgirls or the sarcastic Devon and beatific Michaela in Sirens: On one hand, Sophie wants to be as confident and self-possessed as Margo, as comfortable in her own skin and her desires. On the other hand, Sophie also definitely wants to fuck her, leading to some excellently trashy foreplay. Sophie accidentally spies on Margo and her high-school lover Brad (George Ferrier) having sex and watches long enough for Margo to make eye contact and be noticeably turned on by her voyeurism; the two later make out while playing spin the bottle with Brad and his best friend, Jamie (Chosen Jacobs). Jed’s running for governor of Texas, and if his and Margo’s “flexible” relationship with monogamy came out, it would be disastrous for his campaign; if Graham learned about Sophie and Margo, he’d take their son away. But the women can’t keep their hands off each other, and Snow and Åkerman effectively sell the characters’ hot-and-wrong attraction with coy looks and bit lips; The Hunting Wives knows exactly the porn-y girl-on-girl tropes it’s simultaneously satirizing and indulging.
Through Margo and Sophie’s heart-to-hearts — and the snoopings of the suspicious Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), Margo’s former lover whom she broke up with for Sophie — the series unfurls Sophie’s traumatic backstory. Back in Massachusetts, Sophie had an emergency hysterectomy that made her unable to bear any more children, and she got so depressed and dependent on alcohol that one night she drove drunk and killed a pedestrian. Sophie’s been agonized by it ever since, and that’s why Graham doesn’t let her drive or drink. But under Margo’s influence, she starts drinking again, and driving again, and even buys a gun, all of which end up being used as evidence against her when she’s suspected of killing the teen girl in the series’s opening scene. That was Abby (Madison Wolfe), Brad’s girlfriend, whom he was cheating on with Margo, and she was shot and killed in the woods near Margo and Jed’s lake house on the same night Sophie and Margo were partying with Brad and Jamie. Sophie blacked out and can’t remember anything from that night, but she assumes Margo will corroborate her story that they were there together — except Margo, now more invested in Jed’s gubernatorial campaign and desperate to hide her own past as an escort who grew up in a trailer park, doesn’t. She basically frames Sophie for Abby’s murder, a betrayal that causes Sophie to launch her own investigation into who killed Abby so she can clear her name.
In the season’s last couple of episodes, The Hunting Wives pulls all its various story threads together. (It also gives us a scene of Callie pegging her macho-sheriff husband while dirty-talking about how good he is at arresting people because The Hunting Wives knows exactly what sort of series it is.) The series’s season-long B-plot involves a missing teen girl, and Deputy Wanda Salazar (Karen Rodriguez), one of Maple Brook’s only efficient cops, realizes that the community’s youth pastor, Pete (Paul Teal), was the culprit. When Salazar confronts him, he kills himself and Salazar is able to free his victims. She thinks that he’s responsible for killing Abby, too, but Sophie has a different theory. Before Pete died, he told Sophie that Brad confided in him that Abby had had an abortion — a major no-no for this small town, leading to some hilariously dark dialogue about how much Texans reflexively hate Planned Parenthood — and Sophie goes and immediately tells Abby’s mom, Starr (Chrissy Metz), that she was pregnant. Starr already hated Brad, who took Abby for granted, and Brad’s mom, Jill (Katie Lowes), who didn’t think Abby was good enough for her son. When Starr goes to Jill and Brad’s house to figure out what they know, Jill kills her, and then Callie and Margo stumble upon the scene, leading Callie to kill Jill to defend Margo. This is what happens when everyone has guns and manicured trigger fingers.
It seems like the mystery is solved: Abby was pregnant and got an abortion; Jill found out and killed Abby and then Starr to cover up her first crime; and then Callie killed her, which led to Sophie’s release from jail. But Sophie finds tampons in Margo’s bathroom after they have sex again and vow their love for each other, and she puts it all together. Brad confided to Pete that his girlfriend was pregnant and got an abortion, but he didn’t mean Abby — he meant Margo. Margo couldn’t use a tampon when she and Sophie first met because she had just had an abortion; it’s not a good look for your high-school boyfriend to get you pregnant while your husband is running for governor. Abby discovered all this and threatened Margo, who killed her. Sophie shows up at another fundraiser of Jed’s to tell Margo she knows everything, and she’s unmoved by her lover’s insistence that they can now be together because Abby and Jill are both gone. After Sophie storms out of the party, Margo comes clean to Jed (and gets slapped and kicked out of the mansion in return), and Sophie comes clean to Graham (who leaves her and goes back to Boston).
This is all very different from Cobb’s book, in which Abby actually was pregnant, Jill found out and killed her, drowned Margo for sleeping with Brad, and then also tried to murder Sophie before Callie and the police stopped her. But the changes made by showrunner Rebecca Cutter, who cut her teeth on Starz’s equally twisty-turny thriller Hightown, and her writing team don’t stop there, with a second twist that’s even more thrilling. In the final moments of “Sophie’s Choice,” Margo and Sophie are each brought low, with the former back in the trailer park she “sucked and fucked” her way out of and the latter giving into her self-destructive tendencies: Sophie leaves her son, goes out to buy wine and booze, and drinks while driving home. Margo’s criminal brother, Kyle (Michael Aaron Milligan), who was involved in Margo’s killing of Abby, runs Sophie off the road and tries to intimidate her into staying quiet. But then Sophie, in a fantastically villainous turn that makes you wonder whether her hitting that pedestrian really was an accident, purposely runs over Kyle with her car, then dumps his body over a cliff into a river. As Sophie goes all-in on blowing up her life, she accidentally picks up Kyle’s ringing phone. On the other end is Margo, who tells Kyle that she hopes he isn’t off threatening Sophie — she didn’t want him to do that because she still cares for Sophie, a reveal that moves Sophie to tears. Whoops, though, because Kyle is dead!
On each side of the phone call is a woman damaged by their relationship, and it ends with Sophie overwhelmed by guilt over how she’s hurt Margo by assuming the worst and Margo suspecting that something awful has happened to Kyle, probably because of Sophie. All of this is a great setup for a second season! Does Margo try to claw her way back up the social hierarchy by outing Jed as a hypocrite who supports abortion bans by day while sleeping with sex workers, having threesomes in hot tubs, and basically being a full-time pervert at night? Does she tell her story to Nancy Grace (who already cameo’d in season one), or come out as pansexual and become an LGBTQ+ rights advocate, or use her crack-shot skills to open a gun range of her own? Does she glom onto Callie’s ascending status as a reality-TV star and try to become a low-level celebrity, too, or as a former escort turned millionaire does she become even more like Greer Garrison Winbury from The Perfect Couple and write a tell-all book about her life? Åkerman is compelling and convincing enough as this self-aware seductress that I would eagerly watch any path forward for Margo.
The same goes for Snow, who imbues Sophie with the same edge of veiled menace as she did her teenage neo-Nazi on Nip/Tuck many years ago. Snow uses her huge eyes and seeming placidness to conceal Sophie’s blend of self-hatred and elitist disdain for conservative Texans, which complicates her lust for Margo and could flip their power dynamic even further in a second season. If she can forgive Margo for trying to frame her, could Margo forgive her for killing Kyle, who was often blackmailing Margo anyway? Do they now sync up their stories and provide alibis for each other, or does Sophie break bad even further and decide she should probably kill Margo, too? There are a lot of storytelling options here, especially if a second season were to frame Sophie and Margo as now hunting each other.
Sophie and Margo’s connection would obviously be the main draw of a second season of The Hunting Wives, but the series invests in a number of other subplots that it could pick up down the line to build out Maple Brook’s world (or further mock chest-thumping conservatives). The first season’s framing of the police as some of the dumbest and most corrupt people alive could be good fodder for Salazar, who might make a go for sheriff given how Callie’s husband bungled the Pastor Pete case. Or maybe Margo’s mysterious stalker, played by Hightown alum Atkins Estimond, could be further explained; is he actually a Democratic operative gathering intel on the Bankses, as Sophie assumed, or does he have a nefarious connection to Margo’s shady past? And a continued focus on Brad as a sad boi forever fucked up by his mother, Jill, would be welcome — one of The Hunting Wives’s few flaws this season was how it undersold Jill’s abuse. Providing Brad with a bit more interiority in season two couldn’t hurt. Whichever way The Hunting Wives goes in a second season, though, it’ll be building on a rock-solid foundation of soap-opera plotting and a strong grasp of tone. When a series is confident enough to deliver a cliffhanger involving a literal cliff, that’s the good stuff.