The women of MomTok, the 20- and 30-something Mormon influencers who make up the cast of Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” built their livelihood on upsetting codes of conduct.
The series’s first season was birthed in the wake of a “soft swinging” scandal involving some of its couples. A few of the cast members drink alcohol. Some abstain in keeping with the Church’s doctrine, but interpret its teachings on ketamine use more loosely.
In the show’s second season, which finished airing this month, the group routinely flouted what, in eras past, had been a cardinal rule of reality TV: Don’t break the fourth wall.
“It’s not a shock that I was a fan favorite,” Demi Engemann pointedly told to her MomTok peers in Episode 6. The group had just learned that she tried to convince producers to kick off her co-star Jessi Ngatikaura in order to secure a higher contract for this season. “I feel like I’m an asset, I should fight for more.”
That prompted Taylor Frankie Paul, the unofficial founder of MomTok, to push back about her own negotiations over the very show on which they were appearing.
“I’m the that one that’s actually struggling because I’m open to the [expletive] world,” she said. “If anyone deserves to be paid more it’s me and I’ve never even asked for that.”
For decades, reality was criticized for its highly produced and edited depiction of “reality.” In the early 2000s, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” gained so much notoriety for reshooting supposedly candid, off-the-cuff moments that one publication kept a running column called “Kontinuity Errors” that tracked the days when scenes were filmed, often concluding that moments cobbled together in a singular episode were shot months apart.
When the finale of MTV’s “The Hills” aired in 2010, it ended with a wink to viewers who had long speculated about how much of the reality show was staged. After Kristin Cavallari said goodbye to her former boyfriend Brody Jenner, supposedly on a quiet street with the Hollywood sign looming in the background, cameras panned out to reveal that the scene had been filmed on a set.
At the dawn of the genre in the 1990s, “There was an approach that you never acknowledge that you’re on camera,” said Jeff Jenkins, who directed seasons of MTV’s “Road Rules” and “Real World” franchises. “It was taboo. In fact, I remember people getting fired.”
In-the-moment interviews, or confessionals, where cast members revisit scenes they’ve filmed, offering commentary as if in real time, have almost always been a facet of the genre. But that had been the only crack in the fourth wall that was standard.
Jenkins, who is now an executive producer on “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” said he had seen that change over time. “It kind of evolved into producers impacting stories, kind of on a spectrum from a little bit to a whole lot.”
As the business of reality TV, and the profile of its stars, has grown, it has become increasingly common for cast members to address the dramas that arise in production.
This season of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” has featured a running beef between two stars over whether filming with each other’s former romantic partners constituted a violation. In one episode, Porsha Williams confronted her longtime friend Shamea Morton over dinner with an accusation: “Why are you arguing with me for the show?”
In the Season 9 finale of “Summer House,” Jesse Solomon told his housemate and former fling Lexi Wood, “You’ll watch the show back and see how much I cared for you.”
But none break the fourth wall as regularly as “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” The business of MomTok has made many of its influencers breadwinners in their households, and issues of clout, contracts and appearance fees are as central to the plot as friendship betrayals and broken marriages. They are often the source of those tensions.
Jenkins said viewers would find it inauthentic if “Mormon Wives” didn’t talk about how the show impacted their relationships and wallets.
“Audiences are sophisticated, they understand how reality television is made,” he said. They can “sniff out if something is fake or staged or pretend.”
Certain viewers have lauded this fourth-wall breaking as an appealing way to make reality shows more authentic.
“I LOVE how much the cast breaks the fourth wall, and vocally acknowledge that there are cameras around and that they are on a reality show,” one user wrote on the show’s Reddit thread, which has over 100,000 members.
On X, the podcaster Gibson Johns wrote :“Everyone clocked in. Every episode was great. So many shifting dynamics. Endless bombshells. Constant 4th-wall breaking.” He added: “They’ve unlocked something with this show, and I really hope it keeps going.”
Jenkins expects fourth-wall breaks to continue as reality star and influencer are professions, adding that he and his team look for fourth-wall-shattering moments as they edit, including them if they help explain a plot point more fully.
“Now, because of the dynamics of the modern world, it’s kind of forcing producers to again become very pure documentarians.”
Shivani Gonzalez is a news assistant at The Times who writes a weekly TV column and contributes to a variety of sections.
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