Should You Binge The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives this Weekend?

I am your reality TV doula.

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I’m UNAPOLOGETICALLY passionate about reality TV. Drama that involves wife-swapping, sexually libertine Mormons who first broke on to the scene via Tik Tok drama??? Witnessing someone else's problems in order to ignore my own??

Say less and shoot this content directly into my neck!

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives premiered on Hulu on September 6th with an 8 episode run to largely positive acclaim (though the bar is pretty low let’s be honest). Now Hulu has renewed the show for a second season and ordered 20 more episodes.

Should you wait until your kids are asleep to watch this on your phone under the covers while your husband makes turkey sandwiches and you pretend like you didn’t spend WAY too much on Black Friday sales?

Short answer: yes (with some stipulations).

I don’t watch reality television to get in touch with my highest self. I watch it to be in on all the drama surrounding it on social media. I gotta be in the know! Gotta have my spoon in the soup! Part of the fun is reading the instagram posts the next day, clicking through all the memes and listening to the break downs on podcasts and Tik-Tok. This show has the perfect amount of lore, scandal, botox and hair extensions to top off your holiday gluttony.

beach curls and blue dusters

Here is a primer on the strange content sausage loop that goes from Tik-tok drama vids to a Hulu streaming platform.

Whomst are these Mormoms and are they Messy Enough to Hold My Interest?

The main Mormon wife of the show is Taylor Frankie Paul (that’s right, this woman has three first names as her full name. Mormons, amirite??). Two years before the show premiered,Taylor made an attempt to clear her name from the spicy rumors that were swirling around the combative and pastel realm known as Mom-Tok— the monkier given to moms who make content and the moms that consume it.

Taylor and her husband, along with two other couples, we’re all part of a ‘soft-swinging’ clique in Utah. Three couples would get together play boozey card games and then do some light wife swapping. This only happened twice according to Taylor, but it kicked off enough intra-couple lust that accusations of actual infidelity we’re being thrown around and Taylor’s good (triple) name was being sullied.

Being the intellectual that I am, was utterly glued to this weirdo-drama and have been lurking on Taylor’s feed for the past two years and my diagnosis is that she suffers from extreme thirst and is happy to serve up her own drama to keep banking on the attention economy. I rolled my eyes when she posted about giving up breastfeeding for her ‘mental health.’ I scrolled feverishly when news of her arrest for domestic violence made the news (she ‘threw’ her boyfriend Dakota into a garage door').

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But the more that’s revealed about Taylor, the more of my sympathy she’s gained. She’s definitely a mess but she owns up to a lot of it. I can’t help but feel like a lot of her actions are a result of the strict Mormon upbringing that she grew up in. Taylor, like many other women on the show were encouraged to get married and have children at a very young age. They get married at 19 or 20 or earlier and have 2-3 kids in by the time they turn 25-years old.

Of course, just because you get married early and have kids young doesn’t mean you’ll end up blowing your friend’s husband after playing a round of Cards Against Humanity. But I think young women who are culturally conditioned to go right into being a wife and mother —without exploring their own romantic tastes and desires with different partners over time (scientific name: a ho phase)— are more prone to this type of messy antics.

For better or worse, the drama in the show continues to get drummed up by Taylor. She knows the game and she’s more than willing to play it.

Who Are These Latter Day Babes of Balayage? Are they Soft Swingers too?

Sadly, no, the rest of cast seem to be largely monogamous. But there’s some other decent storylines to obliterate your brain with.

There are seven other Mormon wives featured on the show. Some are very involved with the church (Jen, Whitney, Mayci) while others have a looser relationship to it (Taylor, Layla, Demi, Jessie). The main tension and plot lines of the show circle around the wives’ struggles to find belonging and identity outside the church and the limiting norms imposed on women for those that still interact with it. That means we get to see one of the wives, Whitney, agonizing over whether to accept a $20,000 dollar brand deal with a sex toy company (she does!). Taylor’s parents trash her for having two different baby-daddies, and Jen’s Malfoy-lookin husband ask her for a divorce because she was in the presence of a shirtless man.

bucket hat horcrux

Then there’s Whitney. You may recognize Whitney from the viral clip of her dancing in a hospital room next to her infant who was suffering from RSV. It was pretty shocking and without context, extremely disturbing! It’s also become a visual short hand for the sort of twisted clout obsessed influencer who exploits every vulnerable moment as opportunity for content.

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BUT IN WHITNEY’S DEFENSE *shuffles papers in lawyerly way* her entire account and rise to Tik-Tok ‘fame’ was dancing in every video and she says she was dancing because her baby was on the upswing. Later, she would share that after she and her husband did KETAMINE THERAPY (what did Joseph Smith say about cat tranqs? What ARE the rules?) that she was in a ‘dark place’ and looking back now the video makes her ‘sick’.

Whitney is NOT popular among the commenter class but I actually like her. I think page is entertaining but her debating wether to endorse a sex toy company for her millions of followers seems to conflict with the premise of the show, that being the ‘secretness’ of Mormon wifery. Which brings up the shows main stumbling block.

What are the Rules in the Mormon Universe!?

If you’re like me, you hear Mormons and you get a certain picture in your head. Teetotalers, devoutly religious, and a little high strung.

But on this show the Mormoness of it all was very confusing to me. You’re not supposed to drink, but some of them do. You’re not supposed to have sex before marriage, but some of them do. I definitely think you’re not supposed to have orgies in a cabin in the woods and then publicly air it out on Tik Tok- but we saw how that ended up.

Can you be a casual Mormon? Is there such thing as Mormon-lite?

Are these Mormons the California sober version of devout?

How About the Secret Lives of (Ass Shaking) Mormon MOMS?

There really seems to be a huge disconnect between the storylines Hulu producers have sketched out on the show and what we plebs actually want to learn about from “Mormon wives”. It’s particularly frustrating for people (me, I’m people) who are chronically online and know about these women and their weird, horny, gigantic online footprint.

For instance, one of the wives Jen Affleck (no relation), gets in big trouble with her husband for going to a cheesy Chippendale’s show in Vegas—an obvious stunt for drama, but also pretty tame. The couple argue and at one point hubs sends her a text that says:

Seriously, I don’t want to hear one more thing about your heart. Start taking accountability for your actions and for the situations you put yourself in. You’re a grown woman,” the text read, in part. “It doesn’t matter your intentions. You were there, and that’s the image you portray of yourself, your family, church etc.”

Ok but what about the videos of her shaking her ass on Tik-Tok every day? (FWIW I have no problem with her ass shaking!) This is never mentioned.

Meanwhile, the kids are rightfully excluded from the show but that leaves a giant negative space that I think is likely the most compelling aspect of these women. They all became moms at a very young age. How did that go? One wife had 3 kids by the time she turned 21- her first at 16! What! Tell us more, teen queen!

The main problem here is the show’s high concept premise takes precedence over real life drama and stories that would make the show much better.

There’s no mention of Taylor’s arrest for domestic violence and what happened that night. Who watched the kids while she was in the pokey?

Another woman, Mayci, her fiancé died while she was pregnant, but we are given no details about it or how she coped. How did it impact her kids?

Mikayla, age 24 and mother of three seems to battling some chronic autoimmune disease— which is never discussed despite the fact that she posts about it all the time!

How do these women survive all this while also being MOMS? I’d like to know. There’s millions of moms watching on their phones under their covers who would like to know.

Instead we get to watch Whitney shove a pregnancy test she peed on into a cake that her family is going to eat, and endure endless inquiries of whether “Mom-tok will survive this???” 

Look, I ate up all 8 episodes and will absolutely be binging the second season posthaste. But I hope the Hulu executives or the algorithm or whoever makes the final decision on our streaming content rations, decides to expand the scope of these women beyond just mormons, wives, villains, etc and show us something about what they think of motherhood, what they want for their children, how the view motherhood in the context of the church and if they would be ok with their kids one day shaking their asses on social media. Either way, I’ll be watching.