Everything I know about the Mormon religion, I’ve learned from reality TV. So to my understanding, it’s an organization teeming with sex-obsessed boozehounds and partiers who all have the same haircut and may be single-handedly keeping the soda industry alive.
That could certainly be the (admittedly cheeky) takeaway if you’re a person who consumes episodes of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City like they’re Lisa Barlow’s Big Gulp-sized Diet Cokes, and are one of the many, many people who have spent the week rapt by Hulu’s latest zoological series, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Having been among those held captive against his will by the industry’s latest attempt to exploit a niche population of a community into a televised freak show, I’ve also become suspicious that there may be more secrets yet behind these various Mormon wives. For example, are they all trained in hypnosis? Do they know how to cast spells?
I don’t know how else to justify my evolution from feeling that I was experiencing a waking lobotomy when watching the beginning of the series and vowing to not screen another second of it to a full-on, all-encompassing addiction: an obsession with watching every episode as quickly as possible and then swan diving into a bottomless rabbit hole of as much information and discourse as I can find about these women online.
My morbid curiosity in sampling the series led to instant disgust. The cast’s thirst for reality-TV fame was so radioactive that I couldn’t decide between turning off my TV or searching for the nearest fallout shelter. Unable to choose, I kept watching, equally exasperated and entranced each time a character would get so giddy about bringing up a producer-fed storyline that they’d start grinning, giggling, and blushing into the camera.
No person’s behavior made a lick of sense. No argument had a point. No drama was deep enough to merit exploration beyond the next AI-sounding pop music cue that transitioned to the next scene. It was an entirely new experience for me, a person who has more mileage than he’d care to admit watching so-called “trashy” or “guilty pleasure” reality series: utter bafflement as entertainment.
Forget whether or not MomTok is going to survive this. Am I?
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives follows a group of Salt Lake City women who range from serious practicing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to lapsed followers who were raised on its strict values. More specifically, they are social media influencers who are part of a group called MomTok, who parlayed fascination over their lifestyles into massively popular videos and lucrative brand deals.
There’s a corner of digital celebrity culture where these women are the Beatles—though they are so young as to probably not even understand that comparison—so when scandal hit the group, their lives suddenly rose to the level of TV-show fodder.
The Mormon religion is known for the moral code its members are expected to adhere to, which MomTok was often transparent about. So when it came to light that some members took part in swingers parties with other Mormon couples, it was a bombshell that rocked the community—and the influencer empire. Followers blasted MomTok for being hypocrites. Sponsorship deals dried up. Rifts formed between members.
The Hulu series forces both the philanderers and the judgmentally pious of MomTok together to weather the aftermath and attempt to rebuild the (profitable) community. Hence the series’ refrain, offered a laughable number of times: “I don’t know if MomTok will survive this.”
The tone of the series is an absolute mess. The storytelling is so incompetent as to pendulum-swing back to being, somehow, riveting.
The catalyst of the series is MORMON SWINGER PARTIES, and yet the specifics of what happened are sped over like a tree branch on a highway. How could every scene in every episode not be about getting to the bottom of every single detail about these parties?
There’s a similar surface-level treatment given to the MomTokker who moved to Hawaii to escape the swinger-triggered tabloid drama, only to flee the islands back to Salt Lake City once people online discovered that her husband, who had featured in many of her videos, was on Tinder sending sexually explicit messages and photos.
For added intrigue: She was the one most vocally furious about the swinger scandal and its tawdriness. She also is the mom behind the controversial TikTok filmed when her son battled RSV that went viral (obviously, for negative reasons).
The same episode treats discussion about an eight months pregnant woman whose boyfriend could potentially be abusive and a woman grappling with whether to do a spon-con video about a vibrator with the same gravity.
One scene in a given episode will show the cast partying with massive cups of Mountain Dew and Diet Pepsis, like one of the sleepovers you attended in eighth grade. Another will show them downing shots and chugging champagne at a male strip club.
Two women talk about doing ketamine therapy. Another is mocked for a sex act performed with her husband that involved Fruity Pebbles. Battle lines are drawn between the “sinners” and the “saints” of the group, based on how strictly Mormon they are. But in the end, it’s impossible to understand what exactly modern Mormonism is—whether it’s because the moral code is so ambiguous, or because the storytelling is so scattershot.
The confusion could also be owed to an unsettling phenomenon where these women, by their own admission, all look alike, but change their hair color so often you truly can never be sure who is speaking on screen at any moment. And, after a week deeply entrenched in all things Secret Lives, I arrived at the most puzzling aspect: All of this time spent with these women whose entire “thing” is that they are influencer mavens, yet the series is so inept that not once did I ever feel moved to follow any of them on social media.
I just wrote a litany of reasons why this show is a failure. And yet I’ve become devout. It’s awful, but I want more. I don’t know whether MomTok will survive this travesty. But Secret Lives certainly will.
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