Hunting Wives Review – Best Trash TV Ever | television

THis is his. This is your reward. To get us through Christmas, and through the crisis-filled sorrows of 2025, the TV gods have given us all Hunting Wives, eight episodes of the best garbage to have filled our screens since – well, I don’t even know when. Since competitors? Maybe, but like the book on which the late, great Jilly Cooper was based, this show was too good to qualify for that coveted title. Hunting wives are not. Hunting wives are complete trash. Possibly the most perfect litter ever – how so?

I’m not sure I can fully explain how much fun this is with the paltry resource of the written word available to me, but let me set tentative bounds on its hysterical lines and we’ll see how we get on.

So: Former Democratic campaign manager Sophie O’Neill (Brittany Snow, last seen in The Beast in Me) and her Harvard-educated, architect husband Burke Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) move with Tesla and their young son Jack from their elitist ivory tower in Cambridge, Massachusetts to the small town of Maple Brook, Texas, just south of Basket of Deplorablesville and slightly to the right of Trump, where Graham is starting a new architectural project Burke. job. Everyone is drunk, armed and in heat. Let’s go!

Margo (Malin Akerman) quickly adopts Sophie, the hot second wife (at least — I’ve lost track) of Graham’s new boss, Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), who — together and separately — have a range of sexual orientations that might make headlines if Jed announces a run for governor. Margot is the center of the coolest group of ladies in town and Sophie soon rediscovers her long-buried wild side when she begins to enjoy running around with this lively republican group.

These mean girls with cocktails include: the Sheriff’s wife, Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), who is having an affair with Margo (which is probably okay with the Sheriff, as it seems as if he’s spending time away with one of the young cops in his department); the devout Christian Jill (Katie Louise), wife of the town’s secretly abusive priest and mother to the perpetually insane late-teen Brad (George Ferrer); and two peripheral society figures, Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry), who are largely there to create cocktail parties.

Brad is going out with Abby (Madison Wolfe), the daughter of a single mother who is overweight and therefore will never do it, like Brad would love to do to her. You’ll never guess who he likes to do too. Oh, you have? I did well! You already have a display scale. Isn’t this wonderful?

Every two to three minutes, a new secret is revealed, a bomb is dropped or some sex is had, rarely in heterosexual pairings, in age-appropriate pairings or even in pairings at all. I now understand why Southern hospitality is so legendary. I don’t know where they find the time to pursue all their goals, blackmailing, paying off their black sheep brothers, and framing people for murder, but the Stetsons are headed to everyone in Maplewood. Somehow they succeed.

If you’re paying very close attention – but why would you do that? – You might occasionally detect tiny amounts of sarcasm, I assume, leftover from a very early draft indeed before the writer got a clip around his ear and was advised to leave that sort of thing out of it. The Hunting Wives is adapted from the 2021 book of the same name by May Cobb, which I was minutes away from starting, and thus know neither the author nor the series director, Rebecca Perry Cutter,’s original intentions. I just know I couldn’t be happier with the results of Fast, Furious and Complete, which makes the most of the chemistry of all its leads and has enough wit and wit to keep it from descending into full-blown melodrama while never shortchanging us for glorious brutality. I respect Cobb and Cutter jointly and individually, along with everyone who has already commissioned a second series and given me a reason to look forward to 2026.