“The Hunting Wives,” the first season of which is now on Netflix, is ideal summer TV. This lustful, proudly silly drama is just the kind of thing you can be seduced by on a hot day when all you want to do is sit inside and binge.
Based on the novel by May Cobb and adapted by Rebecca Cutter (“Hightown”), “The Hunting Wives” stars Brittany Snow as Sophie, a recent transplant to small-town Texas from Cambridge, Mass. Sophie once had a career in political public relations, but now her main job is to be the wife of Graham (Evan Jonigkeit), a stick-in-the-mud architect, who is working for the local oil baron, Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). Jed, meanwhile, has G.O.P. aspirations.
Sophie is skeptical of her new home — it doesn’t help when she attends a party at Jed’s house only to discover that it’s an N.R.A. benefit. But she is immediately intrigued by Margo (Malin Akerman), Jed’s flirtatious wife. Just how flirtatious? Well, within minutes of meeting Sophie in a bathroom, Margo is topless. (“Hunting Wives” is audaciously not safe for work.) Sophie is soon recruited to join Margo’s coterie of pals. Their activities involve drinking margaritas, shooting guns and a lot of secret Sapphic action.
The tawdry fun works largely because of Akerman, who seems to be having an absolute ball purring in a twangy accent and making bedroom eyes at everyone in her vicinity. Sophie develops a friend-crush that turns into a crush-crush as Margo unleashes the dormant party girl who went sober after a drunk-driving accident.
In a modern drama cliché, “The Hunting Wives” does open with a shot of a bloodied young woman running through the woods, hinting at the murder mystery that will ultimately unfold. When it does, the show kicks into an even more absurd gear with revelations galore, some of them almost delightfully predictable. It’s worth keeping in mind: All these people are gun owners.
“The Hunting Wives” sets up a kind of red state-blue state conflict, but the plot is largely the stuff of soapy fantasy. There’s nothing new in the idea that beneath all the Bible-thumping and purity rhetoric, there might be a whole lot of dirty stuff going on in rural America. Still, Akerman’s performance makes the case that hypocrisy can be liberating. Like Snow’s wide-eyed Sophie, you’ll have trouble resisting her charms.
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