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There’s no guaranteed formula for success in reality TV, but The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives was set up to go far. Whitney Leavitt, who tries to control the group of Mormon momfluencers and flames out with dramatic flair, is an unusually effective villain. Taylor Paul’s legal and romantic turmoil gives the season a propulsive opening scene and a smart reason to rewind and deliver a “how did we get to this point?” catchup. Jen Affleck (not, apparently, related to Ben Affleck), incorporates main-character dominance with she’s-the-real-victim-here twists, her seeming lack of awareness about the latter making the edit all the more compelling. All that and an instantly self-ironized hashtag — how will #MomTok survive this?
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is more than just a Real Housewives knockoff, though. What gives it the unmistakable, addictive appeal of a 40-ounce diet soda topped with coconut cream is that it’s a Housewives engine carefully nestled inside a more extreme “lifestyle” docuseries: a show with all the drama and mess of a typical Bravo series plus the exotic voyeurism of a TLC series like 19 Kids and Counting, Sister Wives, or even an explicit cult doc like HBO’s The Vow. That combination is the series’ real secret sauce. (Or whatever syrup you prefer to drizzle into your custom soda.)
As a backdrop for TV storytelling, Mormonism has significant perks. It’s recognizably close to the inescapable Christian foundations of many American cultural traditions, with the big set pieces — church, marriage, tenets of morality, Jesus Christ, baptisms, Christmas — offering a familiar system of belief for a large American audience. Shows like Big Love and Sister Wives take place in a marginal, sectarian space of Mormon tradition, but Secret Lives understands there’s no need to go all the way to “polygamist family hidden in plain sight to avoid legal repercussions.” Its eight cast members are women who’ve grown up with or converted to Mormonism, and many of them have become TikTok-famous for their videos glamorizing and de-mystifying their lives as Mormon wives. (Some have also become TikTok famous for a 2022 scandal in which Paul revealed that several couples were “soft swinging.”) This dramatic setting is less like looking into a cult and more like visiting a historical reenactment village. Standard LDS traditions like wearing sacred undergarments, banning alcohol and caffeine, dressing modestly, having large families, and obeying one’s husband can look goofy, quaint, or oddly retrograde on paper. In practice, you end up with a group of women who take them very seriously and almost come to blows after someone takes two swigs from a flask.
Like a cousin to the cult docuseries, lifestyle reality shows set in a highly controlled community outside American norms appeal to two different wells of interest. The first is voyeuristic: How does this belief system function? What are the rules of this particular social world? Why do these people believe this stuff? (Really? Caffeine?) The other is self-reflective: Could I ever believe it? How would I behave if these were the rules I lived by? Secret Lives doesn’t go all the way to implying cult-like harmfulness, but it asks the same questions. Why does it matter who’s invited to your kid’s naming ceremony? Could I put up with my husband throwing a tantrum after I went to a Chippendales show? It’s the same impetus that drives obsession with Bridgerton. What would it be like to live with much stricter, more archaic social norms? Infuriating, and, maybe … thrilling?
All subcultures have their own standards of behavior and hierarchies of class distinction; the Real Housewives franchise itself is a less exaggerated version of peeking into an unfamiliar world. It’s why there are series set in multiple cities, and it’s much of the reason why some are better than others; the shows struggle when they don’t feel distinctly rooted in their specific settings. The point of a New York series is that New York-specific rules — what restaurants to go to, where your money comes from, what clothes are classy and which are gauche — are not necessarily transferable to Atlanta or Miami or Orange County. When those pressures are sharp and palpable (Jenna Lyons has a specifically New York form of celebrity that flummoxes the more traditional housewife models on the RHONY reboot), the show is fun. When everything feels like an undifferentiated mush of new money and invites to all the same parties (looking at you, Miami), there’s less opportunity for a series to stand out.
Based on that standard, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City would seem primed to be one of the best franchises of the bunch, and it often has been. But because its cast includes current, former, and never-been-Mormons, it represents the LDS church as an option that some people in this community choose and others do not. That’s true in the grand scheme, but it makes for a less interesting show. The magnetic (and often deeply upsetting) quality of a lifestyle show — especially when it approaches cultlike levels of groupthink — is not just the arcane rules about how to live. It’s that the participants really believe in them. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is about negotiating all these rules of Mormon culture, even for the women who’ve moved away from their devout Mormon faith. It colors all the superficial, fun outings, like the soda obsession and trips to get Botox because nitrous is one of the only LDS-approved forms of intoxication. All the big dramas are framed by questions of devout behavior: Who gets disinvited to the naming ceremony because they misbehaved at a hot tub party? What defines a traditional marriage, anyway, when they’re all bringing in more money than their spouses?
Secret Wives benefits from the social pressures of Mormonism without making “look at this unusual religion!” the primary thrust of the story, and the rigid rules in turn supercharge the show’s Real Housewives DNA. Taylor, who divorced her husband and got pregnant before getting married again, has broken the rules over and over. Because she owns those mistakes, rule-following members like Jen have the opportunity to forgive her and help her back onto the right path. This is not only a strong plot point in a genre that structures stories around a morass of petty interactions; this is a power struggle, with Taylor ceding power to Jen as an arbiter of good behavior, and Jen wrestling with a desire for power that’s at odds with her own strict belief in giving all that power to her husband. Whitney’s villainy is based in that same tussle: She wants both the subversion of being a little naughty (see: her sex toy promotion), then wants to claim a moral high ground. She learns she’s not capable of negotiating that contradiction when she’s quickly pegged as a hypocritical attention-seeker.
The rules of an LDS belief system are fodder for a whole world of attaining and losing power. The comparatively squishy, fluctuating etiquette codes of RHOBH or Summer House can’t hold a candle to them. Who cares about a squabble over what bedroom you get at the AirBnB when you could instead be fighting about whether one hot tub party has imperiled your husband’s mortal soul?
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