Show notes
The minute the beat drops on Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” during the opening scenes for Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” you know you’re gonna be in for a god damn ride. The camera is trained on social media star Taylor Frankie Paul, a mother of two in her late 20s who is all hair extensions and highlights. She’s also the closest thing this series has to a protagonist. A producer asks a question to set the scene: “So tell us how a couple of Mormon moms, getting together, making TikToks, suddenly turns into this crazy swinging sex scandal?”
Mommy don’t know daddy’s getting hot / at the body shop / doing something unholy…
We then see eight beautiful women in matching pale blue coats, holding hands outside of the Mormon Temple in Provo, Utah. These are the women of MomTok, a content collective of Mormon and formerly Mormon moms who make a living for themselves and their families off of social media influencing and content creation.
If you watch “Secret Lives” seeking tea on the “soft swinging” scandal that blew up online in 2022, you’ll be sorely disappointed. We get a quick primer on the fact that Paul and her ex-husband split after engaging in sexual swapping with other couples in their Very Online friend group, but that’s about it. Every other member of the show’s cast vehemently denies being involved, and soon the swinging scandal recedes into the background altogether. We came for a show about a Mormon sex scandal, and got a show about MomTok’s Whitney Leavitt leaving the group chat. And yet… we’re hooked?
The ties that truly bind these women together are less a sense of shared faith — tensions between the more and less pious make up a large chunk of the show’s drama — and more a shared sense of business opportunity. The MomTokers are colleagues, but also friends, and the social dynamics of those blurry relationships play out in fascinating ways.
They’re also all armed with the sense that their choreographed videos might be a way to challenge the deeply-ingrained, patriarchal culture of the religious community they grew up in. Half of the main cast was married and divorced before 30, and most had children when they were still children or young adults themselves. “We were raised to be these housewives for the men, serving their every desire,” Paul says in the premiere. But now… they’re the breadwinners. One woman, 24-year-old Jen Affleck, financially supports her whole family, but still seems to be responsible for doing the vast majority of child care, cleaning her shared home, and coddling her extremely blonde husband’s very fragile ego.
In episode 7, Demi Engemann directly calls out the ill effects of purity culture and and early marriage within the Mormon community: “It’s kind of a theme with our church…and kind of what the problem is,” she says. “Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.” (Nailed it.)
In this episode, we discuss Paul’s tricky role as the show’s emotional center, saints and sinners, Whitney’s villain edit vs. the real villain (Zac), Demi’s feminist soapbox, Jessi’s company branding, and whether MomTok “can even survive this.” Hope you enjoy! Xo
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