Give ‘The Hunting Wives’ 15 minutes — and you’ll know whether it’s right for you

When Sophie (Brittany Snow) moves from Boston to Texas with her husband so that he can work for a very rich guy named Jed (Dermot Mulroney), she initially fears that she will be unable to relate to the women she meets there. Then, at a party, she encounters Jed’s wife, Margo (Malin Åkerman), who manages to find a reason to take her clothes off within moments of their first meeting.

This is a fitting introduction to The Hunting Wives, an erotic thriller murder mystery series that was initially set to air on Starz but ended up premiering on Netflix in July. You’ll know about 15 minutes into the first episode whether this is a show for you or not. It’s silly, it’s raunchy, it’s high drama. But if it’s up your alley, you might find it a pretty well-executed bit of summer entertainment.

It follows Sophie as she becomes more and more entwined (sometimes literally) with Margo. She gets to know Margo’s possessive bestie, Callie, and the rest of her inner circle, including the local preacher’s wife (Katie Lowes). Shortly after Sophie and her husband hit town, a body is found in the woods, and Sophie becomes urgently interested in figuring out exactly what happened.

There are a lot of murder shows out there, and at first glance, this might seem awfully familiar, with the sexy intrigue and the fish out of water. But this show, based (somewhat loosely) on a book by May Cobb, finds a few variations on the theme that give it a little extra oomph.

For one thing, everybody seems to be having a transparently great time. Åkerman commits fully to Margo, a woman whose sultry magnetism is so over-the-top that it’s surprising she isn’t constantly followed around by everyone she sees — friends, strangers, salespeople, construction workers. One must believe, after all, that Sophie is instantly drawn into Margo’s web, and Margo must therefore be a heck of a web-spinner. Similarly, Mulroney plays Jed as an arrogant bully whose power and influence blanket the community and terrify … well, everybody.

There is, too, the sex. There is a lot of sex in this show, and it’s probably as explicit as anything Netflix has put out there. Is it there to be titillating? Well, sure. Nobody who puts this many naked people on TV does it entirely for educational or creative purposes. But from time to time on this show, there’s some interesting storytelling about women whose experiences with men are less powerful than their experiences with other women, even if not a single character in this show would necessarily call herself, for instance, bisexual, at least not out loud. Sexuality just doesn’t feel like a conversation these women are going to have, even with women they’re having sex with. And whether that makes them more free-thinking or more constricted is unclear at times, just like the line between simply leaving your sex life private and making it a secret you’re afraid of.

Creator Rebecca Cutter and the other writers also understand how to pace a murder mystery. Initially, The Hunting Wives has the structure that we’ve all seen many times, starting with something dramatic — here, a woman is shot in the woods — and then the episodes go back in time to find out what happened, to learn who the woman is and who shot her. But when a show employs that structure and saves all the answers until the very end, it can make the middle episodes very slow, with the distinct sense that you’re marking time, because you are.

Here, relevant facts come out bit by bit, and the story chronologically catches up to and then passes that initial scary moment of the shooting within a few episodes, so you’re not waiting and waiting just to arrive at the place where you already know you’re headed. And by the end, the show manages to answer the major questions that it introduced while also certainly leaving itself avenues for another season, should there be one.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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