“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is the bleakest show on television

Reality television isn’t necessarily supposed to elicit joy, but it definitely isn’t supposed to make a viewer feel as desolate as “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” made me feel when I finished episode eight. 

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” Hulu’s newest reality series, follows the lives of eight wives and mothers in Provo, Utah — all of them, unsurprisingly, with ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The women are all members of “MomTok,” an incredibly lucrative pseudo-friendship and business partnership in which they appear in each other’s social media content and rack up influential followings and sponsorships. 

Outside of their followers, MomTok gained traction because the “leader,” Taylor Paul, revealed that the Mormon husbands and wives she surrounded herself with actively participated in “soft-swinging.” Despite the fact that Paul is the only woman out of the eight main characters to have participated in the swinging, this scandal is what initially drew in most people to the show — but it is absolutely not what kept me, or anyone else, around after episode one. 

I’ve watched a lot of reality TV in my life. And because of that, I can truthfully say I have never watched something as upsetting and enraging as this show. “Secret Lives” is not a run-of-the-mill “Real Housewives” or “Vanderpump Rules” franchise about questionable people doing questionable things. This is a show actively shedding light on the emotional manipulation, abuse and humiliation that women in the Mormon church are subjected to day in and day out. 

In the grand scheme of things that “Secret Lives” covers in its short runtime of eight episodes, the swinging “scandal” is the least concerning. I’m expected to care about adults engaging in consensual activities when one of the women on this show got pregnant at 16 by a 21-year-old  she’s been married to ever since? Or another woman reveals she’s staying with her husband who’s been cheating on her their entire marriage? Or a wife breaks down because her husband publicly shames her so badly she thinks he’s going to divorce her?

Demi, one of the more progressive Mormons on the show, says it best — “It’s a theme with our church, though, and kind of what the problem is. Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.” This quote is not an exaggeration whatsoever. Mikayla Matthews is 24 years old with three children, the first of whom she had at 17 — the same year she got married to a 22-year-old. Layla Taylor is a 23-year-old divorcee and mother of two. Jen Affleck married her husband at 19 and now, at 23, has two children. Every woman on this show is under the age of 33, and all of them have multiple children.

There is a marked difference between the women on this show — and it’s not the “sinners and saints” dichotomy they make up for themselves. I’d classify the difference as the emotionally mature and the emotionally stunted, the former of which includes Demi, Jessi and Mayci and the latter of which includes Taylor, Jen and Whitney. Demi is divorced, Jessi married later in life and Mayci has a husband that encourages her to be successful and entirely her own person. Taylor is seemingly incapable of being in a stable relationship, Jen’s husband shames her at every opportunity and Whitney projects her own problems onto everyone else.

I hate that there is a clear denominator between the groups — women who have had the opportunity to form their identities independently, and women who have formed who they are based around the men in their lives. 

It is not fun or enjoyable to watch Jen, whose husband gambled away his medical school money and expects her to provide financially while remaining a demure and lifeless cardboard cutout of a trad-wife, lose the energy and spirit she was so known for in the first few episodes. It is not gratifying to watch Taylor try desperately to assert her independence and be told by her partner and family that she must get married again to be normal.

Every single “Mormon wife” on this show is a business woman. They are all the primary breadwinners in their relationships, and still they are relegated to being “Mormon Wives” in the title of their own show. This is the life that their society and religion wants them to fit into, and it is admirable and heartbreaking to watch them all try to break out of that jail — especially because some women succeed more than others do. 

The show is feminist — there’s no doubt about that. Everyone featured is pursuing some form of a progressive Mormon life, but it is a tragedy that the bar is so low and that only in the year 2024 are “Mormon wives” starting to assert their own power and influence. The production team does a surprisingly good job of showing the audience just how backwards so much of this show is, but even that doesn’t feel like enough to justify watching these women act as direct products of their environment. 

I am not here to shame other women for the life decisions they make. In fact, I am sincerely happy for women who make the independent decision to primarily be mothers and wives. But I don’t think that many of the women on this show ever felt like they had the choice of an alternate path. This is the only life young Mormon girls are shown while growing up, and I can’t help but imagine the lives these incredibly intelligent and savvy women could have had if given the opportunity to be their own person during their 20s. 

I hope this show is a wake-up call for both the audience and the people featured in it — why is anyone getting satisfaction from watching such clear misogyny, and why are the women in these positions in the first place? More importantly, what can this show’s platform do to better the lives of women like Jen, Taylor and Whitney?