Guilty pleasures TV – The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
Guilty pleasures TV – The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
This blog is for pure unadulterated pleasure – it bears no relationship to my theatre writing-making, the life of the poetry scene or PR for any particular person, thing or myself. In fact, I’m writing this on a Saturday morning, which shows how much I want to write about click-bait TV…for pleasure.
So let’s get to it. The more I watch US reality TV while making lists, moisturising my face and eating things on crackers, the more the vernacular is creeping into my everyday monologue. I live alone and so a lot of things make it into my monologue, including Gen Z pop songs that don’t belong to sophisticated women in their early forties. The point is, US reality TV is designed to be more-ish and I’m now a self-confessed addict. Part of this series of blogs is to figure out – WHY?
Where better to start than in Utah? Utah is a big, arid basin of rock in the middle of nowhere, and as such is a perfect breeding ground for the ingredients of TV reality – gossip, kink, strained relationships, unplanned pregnancies and ambition to dominate that questionable portal to the world – social media.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives started airing last year (2024) off the back of scandal surrounding Mom Tok a Tik Tok group of young, pretty, Mormon wives ‘whooping it up’ for the next generation in short-form content…mainly what I call broom-cupboard dancing.
This was a stroke of genius from the creators of the show, Jeff Jenkins Productions for Hulu, because not only had they found something sacrosanct in reality TV– pretty people transgressing – but they found it deep in one of the homes of patriarchal religion, on the tail-end of a controversy about, joy upon joy, swinging!
So the lives of six or so Mormon raised content creators have now been jettisoned into a fourth plane of reality – Disney+ I love that it is streaming on a platform built on virginal princesses and princes in jodhpurs. It is all very Jilly Cooper with Bibles.
It is very easy to be glib about reality TV stars’ lives as they’re existence has been purposely filmed for the cracker-eating shift and escaping into well-lit life-style habitats – the Mormon Wives’ homes are all uniformly – large, white, streamlined and scattered with poofy things as are the hotel rooms they frequent on girls trips – large, white, rocky-views and scattered with poofy things.
They also do a lot of lounging and chatting– which for brief moments in time, will transport Britons to a world where high-spec housing is eminently affordable and work is something that happens in-between a visit to the florist or soda shop. Aha! So, here is one source of addiction…the formula can, if imbibed, help us restyle the perception of our daily shlep, or temporarily make us feel part of a less stressful, less transactional society.
And of course, for most, Mormon wives are a community who aren’t answerable to a boss, the irony being blatant, and another trump card for the producers of the show – their husbands and boyfriends often try to take on this role in obvious and stroppy-adolescent ways – this being the main source of drama. Good, I think we have found another reason why this stuff is so addictive…it feeds into a common struggle for respect that women still have to engage with at home, work and play – a universal trope provided, unsurprisingly, from a religious community.
So how are Taylor, Demi, Jen, Mikayla, Whitney, Layla, and all the other pretty ones faring in Season 1 & 2? Well, it’s important to mention that Taylor is an infinitely likeable protagonist and inroad into this group – after admitting to ‘soft swinging’ with friends in a Tik Tok video, she has shown extreme rawness in her mixed feelings about this, and regret about the fall-out among her yummy mummy/daddy friends who may or may not have taken part. The grace with which she suffers her stepfather slut-shaming her for sleeping with her boyfriend after three dates, also speaks volumes of an inner strength and independence that shines, oddly, through volatile drama.
We also trace the tribulations of Taylor’s second partnership, following a controlling first marriage that ended in divorce – this is also a theme in the group, who consciously seek empowerment and find varying degrees of it in their new relationships with members of the same community.
Taylor’s new substitute-hub, Dakota, has all the hallmarks of a recovering douchebag, with redeemable qualities surfacing after the trauma of new parenthood. The question – will he ever give her peace of mind? is a constant, and here lies another source of emotionally undemanding pleasure – shows likes Mormon Wives, Vanderpump Rules and Below Deck (some personal favourites) are expert at getting us to invest in personal stories and creating sensational cliff-hangers of 1950s batman proportions at the end of each episode. This usually involves edits of people screaming at each other.
Sadly, part of each personal story is infiltrated with the pressure of the mechanism through which we know them – recording and broadcasting. There is a particularly tender section of Season 2, in which Jen, beached to her bed with depression is clearly numb to her environment, her husband’s hug, and to a degree, her children’s interactions. Caught in a vacuum of isolation, confused as to whether to follow her husband’s narrative on what is right and wrong, the Mom Tokers’ view or (at the formative age of 24) her own, the crew decide to stop filming.
The stories of all the show’s characters will inevitably be shaped by the desert goldfish bowl they have subscribed to. I hope for their sake that they will fair better, brighter and more empowered than the wounded war-horses of Vanderpump Rules. One thing’s for sure – I will likely be watching.
To be continued…
