Reviews of The Hunting Wives have been taking the line of “it’s complete trash but I love it!”, which seems a perfectly reasonable response. It’s an everyday story of deceit, murder, weird sex and all kinds of corruption, set deep in the heart of Texas where they have some very strict ideas about guns and religion, especially the entirely taboo topic of abortion.
Adapted from May Cobb’s novel by screenwriter Rebecca Cutter, it centres on a tightly-knit group of women in li’l old Maple Brook, TX. Joining them is new kid in town Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow) and her rather uptight and preppy husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit), an architect who has been hired by local oil baron Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). Sophie and Graham have breezed in from upscale Cambridge, Massachusetts, so the Texans are instinctively suspicious of their snooty East Coast airs and graces.
However, Sophie is soon befriended by Jed’s wife Margo (a sizzling performance by Malin Akerman), who plays the extrovert den-mother to the local women who all love drinking, gossiping, and grabbing their rifles to go out shooting wild boar. Sophie’s first reactions are alarm and surprise, but she’s soon swept along by Margo’s outsized personality and aura of natural command. Before she knows it, she finds herself in the local gun shop getting tooled up with a rifle and a handgun. Though she daren’t tell her husband about this (pictured below, Margo and Sophie with shotgun).
But Margo also has a more insidious influence on Sophie. Soon she’s making erotic overtures to her, and Sophie seems entirely happy to put up no resistance whatsoever. Indeed, they’re soon in the throes of a full-scale affair, triggering the seething resentment of Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), Margo’s former flame.
Before Sophie became a respectable wife and mother to young son Jack (as we will eventually learn), she had a previous career as a boozing, coke-snorting wild child and killed a pedestrian while driving under the influence. It’s as if Margo has telepathically zeroed in on her alter ego, and triggered her unconscious urge to go back there.
But events take a very dark turn one night, when Sophie ends up staying over at Margo’s house. She has exceeded the Surgeon General’s recommended alcohol limit by a factor of several, and spends the night crashed out in a spare bedroom. Imagine her horror, therefore, when she’s subsequently told by the town sheriff that a local girl, Abby (Madison Wolfe), has been found dead, killed by bullets from Sophie’s pistol. Margo, inconveniently, had been summoned to a “family emergency” during the night, thus depriving Sophie of an alibi (the wives gather, pictured below).
All of this works itself out over eight episodes, during which we get a deep-dive investigation of the population of Maple Brook and their tangled allegiances, secrets and peccadilloes. For instance, Callie spices up her love-life with husband Johnny, the local police chief, with strap-on sex toys, while Jed Banks gets his kicks from watching Margo cavorting with other women in their bed. Officially, of course, Jed is an honest God-fearing citizen who supports his local church, and is aiming to get elected as Governor of Texas. In Maple Brook, though, it’s really the women who call the shots and make the wheels go round.
The denouement evolves into a tortuous murder mystery, with a shooting-gallery of suspects and victims popping in and out of the frame. Even denizens of the church community, it seems, cannot be absolved of all sin, and the most unexpected characters may turn out to be ruthless killers when the chips are down. It makes you wonder what they really get up to down there in the Lone Star State. As country singer George Strait put it, “All my exes live in Texas / And that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee”.
The Hunting Wives is on ITV1 on Saturdays. All episodes available on ITVX
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