The Hunting Wives Review – Sleazy, Scandalous, And Wickedly Worth Watching

The Hunting Wives opens on a fundraiser in Maple Brook, Texas, where Boston transplant Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow) watches Margo Banks (Malin Åkerman) work a room and then watches her work Sophie. Creator-showrunner Rebecca Cutter adapts May Cobb’s novel as a glossy eight-episode Netflix thriller (premiered July 21, 2025), tracking how a new friendship curdles into obsession amid guns, gossip, and a murder that won’t stay solved.

Director Julie Anne Robinson sets the show’s grammar in the pilot: flirtation as misdirection, booze as accelerant, and every party as a potential crime scene. Cutter and executive producers Erwin Stoff, Julie Anne Robinson, and Cobb keep the frame tight on Sophie and Margo, while the town, Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), sheriff’s wife Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), tiger mom Jill (Katie Lowes), youth pastor Pete (Paul Teal), and grieving mother Starr (Chrissy Metz) supplies the pressures that turn bad choices into lethal ones.

The hook is simple: Who killed Abby, a local teen? The answer is not.

Act one of The Hunting Wives is seduction and sorting. Sophie tries to fit in at Jed’s NRA-adjacent fundraiser when she stumbles on Margo in a bathroom cabinet. Sophie offers a tampon. Margo demurs that she “couldn’t use one of those,” a tossed-off line that eventually becomes evidentiary. By the next day, Margo is teaching Sophie to drive stick in a maroon truck, yelling,

“We’re doing donuts, baby!”

As the pair skids across an empty lot. A rifle lesson follows, so does a ritual of late nights, mint juleps, and alibis. Robinson shoots these scenes like invitations, not warnings, which is why the season’s first body, Abby’s, is a shock that lands as a hangover rather than a thunderclap.

Act two of The Hunting Wives moves to the lake house, where Cutter braids lust into motive. A spin-the-bottle game locks Sophie and Margo into their first kiss while Brad (George Ferrier), Jill’s son and Abby’s boyfriend, watches. The show doesn’t flinch from the queasy dynamics: the wives chase thrills. The boys chase status.

The camera keeps receipts. Around them, Callie and Margo’s on-again intimacy sours into territorial skirmishes; Margo later insists to Jed they’re not “polyamorous” but “open,” a boundary that fits the couple’s politics and power.

In one hot-tub beat, Margo kisses Jed hello and calls him “Daddy,” a one-word thesis for the marriage and the town. By the midpoint, suspicion shifts to Sophie when the murder weapon traced to Abby’s death turns out to be her gun.

The Hunting Wives Act three broadens the suspect pool and makes space for Maple Brook’s other predator. Pastor Pete, introduced as a smarmy constant in youth spaces, becomes a person of interest; a later pursuit reveals two kidnapped girls in his U-Haul after he dies by suicide, a grim detour that underlines the show’s thesis: rot hides in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Jill shoots Starr inside her kitchen, an ugly, offscreen confrontation that the police first accept as self-defence. Cutter uses these deaths to clear brush around the core conflict: Sophie versus Margo, truth versus survival, desire versus fallout.

The Hunting Wives finale clicks when Sophie remembers that bathroom line about tampons. After Pastor Pete tells her Brad said his “girlfriend” had an abortion, Sophie realizes Abby was never pregnant, Margo was. The tampon detail becomes the hinge: Margo had a recent abortion, which tied her to Brad and gave Abby leverage. In a private confrontation, Margo admits to killing Abby to protect her life with Jed and her carefully curated image. Jed ejects her from the house.

Margo pivots to Callie for cover. The confession doesn’t travel far enough, fast enough. Margo’s brother Kyle tails Sophie, menaces her on a road, and dies when she runs him over in panic, an echo of Sophie’s earlier vehicular manslaughter in Boston that she kept from the wives to preserve her probation and her image as a reformed mother. The season ends with two women holding opposite halves of a secret: Sophie knows Margo is Abby’s killer.

Margo suspects Sophie is Kyle’s. Cutter’s alterations from Cobb’s book, naming Margo, not Jill, as Abby’s killer. Darkening Sophie’s arc is intentional, designed to leave the story open for a second season without softening the blow of this one.

Cutter and team stage 5-7 needle drop moments as character study as much as provocation. A donor gala doubles as the meet-cute and the clue (“couldn’t use one of those”). The donut-driving bit crystallises Margo’s bait-and-switch charm (“We’re doing donuts, baby!”).

The lake-house spin-the-bottle kiss cements the affair as a plot driver rather than mere styling. The hot-tub “Daddy” beat, the “we’re not polyamorous” clarification, and a late argument where Jed says he “doesn’t want to listen to her feminist ideals” sketch the hypocrisy around Margo’s marriage and campaign veneer. Even the much-discussed episode-7 pegging scene, the one that had think pieces and TikToks humming, plays as power math rather than shock value.

Performance and craft keep the pulp legible. Snow charts Sophie’s slide from anxious joiner to shaky investigator with clipped line readings and a wary stillness. Åkerman flips between conspiratorial warmth and reptilian calm in a way that makes Margo’s confession plausible and chilling.

Robinson’s pilot establishes a look, polished kitchens, humid woods, church light, and cinematographers Richard Rutkowski, Michał Sobociński, and Bryce Fortner keep it consistent as the plot heats up.

Composer Jeff Danna’s cues needle the transitions, toggling between sultry and foreboding. Even the source music does character work, like the truck-lot joyride where Margo whoops through the window as if motion alone can outrun consequence.

Reception has mirrored The Hunting Wives’ split self: critics called it “highly bingeable fun,” while viewers debated the ethics of its lake-house games and its parade of s*x-as-politics set pieces. In Texas, some praised the detail work. Others bristled at the caricature.

On Reddit, arguments over likability and consent ran hotter than a boar hunt brunch. Whatever the camp quotient, the The Hunting Wives finale’s logic holds: the earliest scenes hide the answers, and the loudest scandals are camouflage for the quiet ones.

Verdict: The Hunting Wives is cut to be consumed, tight, tawdry, and precise about how status shields harm. The season concludes where it began, at a bathroom cabinet and a party, except now the characters understand what the audience does: every “open secret” is still a secret.

Whether Netflix renews The Hunting Wives or not, Cutter lands the season as a closed loop with live wires, and leaves Sophie and Margo exactly where the show wants them, exposed, powerful, and waiting for the next shot to be fired.

Stay tuned for more updates.