'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' is the hell we deserve
#MomTok is coming for all of us
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promotes a version of the afterlife that differs slightly from the more popular monotheisms. Instead of a salvation/damnation binary, Mormon orthodoxy claims there are circles of heaven, or “degrees of glory,” where souls reside based on a person’s faithfulness during life, each with its own criteria for entry. I don’t feel great about my chances of admission to any of those places, but I guess on the plus side, I won’t have to spend eternity with any of the Mormon Wives.
I am not proud to admit that over the holiday I inadvertently got sucked into the existential vortex of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. It doesn’t matter why this happened, but in an odd way, I am glad it did. It’s not every weekend a person gets to feel their heart scrape the bottom of the American abyss without having to leave the couch.
The series follows a group of 20-something Mormon women who were already well-known on TikTok, less for their posts showcasing a #relatable side of their religion than for a viral story in 2022 about how they were all swapping husbands. After becoming internet-famous, they were of course put in front of cameras for a reality show, whose second season recently appeared on Hulu and reportedly was streamed by at least 5 million people in its first week.
Since many of the cast members don’t drink alcohol (due to being Mormon and frequently pregnant), the series will disappoint viewers hoping to see women throwing glasses of wine at each other in the reverse-feminist tradition of trainwreck reality television. But even with a relative lack of booze, everyone manages to appear desperately unhinged, providing people on the other side of the screen with more than enough drinking-game fodder to get good and shitfaced while socially hate-watching, which is how I suspect the show is mostly being consumed.
The Mormon Wives all have names like Taylor, Mikayla, Layla and Mayci. Another is Jen Affleck, whose name’s homophonic similarity to “Ben Affleck” is apparently a whole thing that has been memed and litigated to death online. Per the strictures of their faith, all of the women have gotten married and started having children as soon as the law allows and seem ready to explode from the resulting sexual confinement. Some are now divorced for reasons absolutely nobody could have predicted.
They are professional influencers in Utah, the cradle of the Mormon Church, where under the collective label of #MomTok they create “head-turning content” (their term), mostly videos of themselves dancing between their gender-normative housekeeping chores. This includes a famously deranged clip in which one of the women gyrates to a Kendrick Lamar song next to her infant son as he lies intubated in a NICU bed.
Lead us not into anything of substance
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives begins with baroque, mock-dramatic choral theme music and gives its episodes ornate titles — “The Book of Broken Vows,” “The Book of Taboos,” “The Book of Retribution” — suggesting degrees of provocation and self-awareness that never quite materialize. This is too bad, because there are several interesting ideas embedded in the premise of the series that are paid, at best, some collagen-heavy lip service.
#MomTok, we are told multiple times per episode, is an effort to capture the complexity of living faithfully in the modern world, with the additional challenges of Girl Bossing within the boundaries of a patriarchal tradition. The women’s notoriety has turned some of them into family breadwinners, which adds intrigue to the performance of wifely subservience that is demanded by their religion.
Contrary to popular stereotype (and the details of the story that made them celebrities), the Mormon Church discontinued polygamy in the 19th Century except for some fringe practitioners. Like the other big religions, it promotes lifetime partnership, but seems unusually aggressive about it. A woman in season one correctly observes that everyone gets married “before their brains are fully formed.” This would seem to make the concept of monogamy ripe for interrogation, especially given the current of confused bicurious energy that seems to course through most of their group activities and what seem to be half-formed attitudes about sex in general.
The Church has condemned the series (indirectly) as an inaccurate, sensationalized presentation of its worldview, which maybe it is. There is very little engagement with Mormonism apart from the Wives telling the camera every five minutes that they’re Mormon. At no point do any of the women seriously consider leaving the faith, or at least the lifestyle of that faith, despite the many obvious indications that the real problem is the Church’s oppressive dogma rather than their individual struggles to thrive within it.
The people involved with the show would probably say they are wrestling with these ideas, but the finished product consists almost entirely of ordinary reality TV histrionics (minus, again, the wine-throwing). Each episode gathers a quorum of women somewhere outside their cluster of interchangeable McMansions. They get their hair or nails styled, attend contrived parties, sit in generic upscale restaurants or fight over bedrooms in a succession of beige Airbnbs where, once situated, they configure themselves into tenuous alliances within the larger group that shift according to no traceable logic. They talk about literally nothing. They gossip about the people who aren’t there, and also the people who are there once they leave the room. They talk about who backstabbed whom, who missed whose baby shower, who failed to validate the feelings of whom and whose husband is the worst (the only subject of genuine suspense).
The action, as it were, unfolds in a liminal zone isolated from current events, economics, geography, climate change and even the Gregorian calendar. (Watch any random episode and see if you can figure out what season it is.) It is impossible to tell where each person’s social media persona ends and where their actual personality begins, or to what extent there is any difference. There are tense confrontations about who posted what thing to what platform, whose life moment got the most likes, who aligned themselves with what brand, who said what in the comments, who unfollowed whom, and who failed, for instance, to publicly congratulate Taylor Frankie Paul (the closest thing to a point-of-view figure) on being named a presenter at the Country Music Awards, a collective betrayal that required almost an entire episode to unpack.
There is a purgatorial quality to how time passes during Secret Lives. People in the series repeat things to the interview camera that they just said to the larger group, or narrate action that we have already seen without providing any additional insight. They bicker about interpersonal minutiae that nobody with a spouse or children should have the capacity to care about. Interactions are forensically explicated until suddenly the episode is over. Single moments with no need to have been televised seem to stretch into eternity, generating a kind of hell — figurative hell, not Mormon hell — that starts to feel like home after a while.
Honestly, I thought these flames would be hotter
There could be a worthwhile conversation over which groups on the show are being victimized or exploited and which are being correctly rewarded and lionized in the #discourse. The women might be trapped, but at least they’re getting rich from it. The husbands/baby-dads are all some combination of monstrous, tragic or closeted, but(/and) they get to benefit from the the system of generational misogyny they will cluelessly perpetuate. The many, many children, in one of the only admirable decisions made in the production of the series, rarely appear onscreen. At least one party, however, is unambiguously getting everything it deserves: the audience.
I had started watching the confessional segments to discern whether the women were blinking in Morse code to broadcast messages of distress, but then I wondered, are they the hostages or am I? I’m the one who joined the bovine millions willfully ingesting the Content and surrendering my behavioral data in addition to the minutes and hours of my life that will never come back. I’m the one hitting “next episode” instead of feeling the sun on my skin, reading a book or teaching my own daughter how to become a faith-based influencer. I’m the one viewing in a passive stupor while the inner void, formed in collaboration with whatever stage of capitalism this is, becomes wider and hungrier. I’m the one whose eyes are turning black while the Mormon Wives women accumulate fractionally more CLOUT within the attention-driven economy that we have allowed to monopolize and monetize every wasted second of our existence. I’m the one writing a shitty piss-take while the worlds of reality television and global politics complete their disastrous merger.
At least once per episode, someone says: “The real question is, will #MomTok survive this?” Tragically, it not only survives whatever it encounters but metastasizes and permeates the cultural hive-brain like a Cordyceps fungus. It won’t rest until the entire world is dressed in form-fitting athleisure and dancing uncontrollably to the distant sound of pop music generated by an algorithm none of us remember opting into, while the cries of unattended children build into a cacophony. Maybe I am already #MomTok. Maybe all of us are.