What do you get when you take a murder mystery in a small Texas town and layer in right-versus-left culture wars and a clique of vindictive, morally messy women who carry guns in their handbags and have sex with one another? Apparently, a hit show.
“The Hunting Wives,” a series that began streaming on Netflix on July 21 last week, soared to the platform’s top spot in the United States.
The show stars Brittany Snow, Malin Akerman, Dermot Mulroney, Chrissy Metz and Katie Lowes, and is based on a 2021 novel by May Cobb. Initially headed to Starzin May, just weeks before its scheduled release, the network dropped the show. The production company, Lionsgate pivoted to Netflix.
That put the show in front of a larger audience, and its success has been “unexpected,” said Rebecca Cutter, the creator, executive producer and showrunner of the series. “To be a little bit ridiculous and not shy away from really pulpy storytelling is, I think, refreshing to people.”
“I’m pleased as punch,” she added.
Pulpy is certainly one way to describe it. The show, which leans hard on common tropes, plops Sophie O’Neil (Ms. Snow), a coastal career woman from Cambridge, Mass., inside the fictional Texas town of Maple Brook. There, she is swept up in a circle of gun-toting, churchgoing women who say they don’t work — they “wife.”
As part of her research for the show, Ms. Cutter, who is from Cambridge, visited Ms. Cobb in Dallas, and went on a road trip together, along with Ms. Cobb’s friends and family, to Longview, the East Texas town that inspired Maple Brook.
“We shot some guns, met the family, went to the honky-tonk — you know, really got the flavor of the place,” Ms. Cutter said. At one point, someone’s father brought out his AR-15 rifle.
In the book, Sophie grows up in Maple Brook. But for the show, Ms. Cutter decided to make the character a complete outsider to Texan culture and mores.
“I was thinking, How can we make this as explosive as possible, as fish-out-of-water as possible and highlight the culture war as much as possible?”
That seems to have resonated. Last week, the show became the most streamed series in the United States across all major platforms, according to Luminate, an entertainment data analytics firm. And the book’s publisher Berkley said that sales had jumped 5,000 percent in the last week. The title has also landed on Amazon’s top 10 list, Ms. Cobb said in an emailed statement. Before the Netflix show, the highest that the book ever ranked on Amazon was 1,000.
“It feels utterly surreal and bonkers,” she said. “I’ve heard from elementary school classmates, friends who I’ve not been in touch with in years.” Almost all of them, have told her more or less the same thing: “I binged it, I loved it.”
Then comes the sex. So much sex — sapphic sex, threesomes, intimate moments at a cabin in the woods — all of which initially worried Ms. Cutter. She even Googled whether Netflix allowed showing breasts onscreen.
“I didn’t know if all this sex would be a negative or a positive,” she said.
Regardless
the show seems to have found an audience. All over TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, women, in particular, are sharing that it is actually the sex scenes they enjoy and are jokingly questioning their own sexuality as a result (one user tagged her TikTok video reacting to the show with the hashtag #arewestillstraight). On Reddit, fans are having long discussions about their love for Ms. Akerman, who plays Margo Banks, a ringleader of the so-called hunting wives.
The show fits with a broader surge in sapphic pop culture over the last couple of years, with the growing popularity of queer artists, like Chappell Roan, and a “proliferation of queer sapphic characters in various shows and movies,” said Karen Tongson, chair of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California. The mainstreaming of sapphic culture first blossomed “in the ’90s, with k.d. Lang being shaved by Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair,” she said, and is now cycling back into the spotlight.
It is also the irony of seeing this kind of female sexual exploration unfold within the conservativism of the Texan town the story is set in that makes it all the more “titillating,” Ms. Tongson added.
“When I saw that Cheryl Dunye was a director on ‘Hunting Wives,’ I knew the sex would be good!” said Jiz Lee, marketing director of Pink & White Productions, an adult film studio, referring to a filmmaker renowned for her work in queer porn.
In an interview on “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” the actress Ms. Snow joked about the nature and frequency of these scenes. Her mother, she said, usually watches her shows and movies with a group of friends.
Watching “The Hunting Wives” was “a really interesting party for them,” she told Mr. Meyers. “Just, ‘Oh, we got to fast-forward through that. Nope. We’re going to fast-forward. Oh, we have to fast-forward again.’”
With all that fast-forwarding through all of the sex scenes, Mr. Meyers joked each episode must have been just “like six minutes.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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