The titular heroines in Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives have always been case studies in modern contradictions. They’re members of a pious, abstinence-obsessed church, yet queen bee Taylor Frankie Paul’s swinging sex scandal was one of the series’ initial selling points.
Mormon women are expected to follow their husbands tradwife-style, but these ladies are their families’ multi-million dollar breadwinners. They’re part of a self-described sisterhood through MomTok, but they’re also high-powered coworkers seeking to better optimize themselves.
Perhaps Mormonism and the influencer sphere have captivated audiences precisely because of the unspoken incongruities of these worlds. Once secretive, these niche corners of society are now being pushed to the surface in ways that might just help explain the bizarro culture of 2020s America.
Mormons’ emphasis on proselytizing have helped Mormon women conquer influencing across algorithms, from mommy blogging on WordPress to many of our TikTok For You Pages. A deeply individualistic, constantly shifting industry with seemingly limitless opportunities to rack up your cash flow? It doesn’t get much more American than that, and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 3 continues to feel eerily of-the-moment.
Like its spiritual predecessor, Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, the bulk of Secret Lives’ storylines unfold throughout a series of almost Regency Era-esque parties and social calls (in this case, they’re predominantly influencer brand events and dirty soda runs). But because the cast are already bankable names online, the show is able to sidestep the pains that similar reality shows once took to hide their stars’ monetary aims.
There’s no need for production to stage a dinner party to elicit a confrontation between two women, because they’ll both be at the same product launch. Likewise, their influencing careers have made the era of reality casts hiding their dreams of social media stardom for fear of being dubbed “here for the wrong reasons” moot. Secret Lives’ editing constantly winks at the women’s online ubiquity, whether through modeling the opening credits after Google search results or inserting clips of their TikToks as scene transitions.
During the first two seasons, Taylor’s endlessly messy charisma made her a clear choice for the closest thing Secret Lives had to a protagonist — so much so that, in September, ABC announced her as the next Bachelorette in hopes of invigorating the franchise. The network clearly hopes that her cultural cachet will boost viewership.
Still, given Taylor’s history of ‘soft swinging’ and a past domestic violence arrest, she’s a controversial candidate. Because both shows are under the ABC corporate umbrella, it’s difficult to shake the sense that her Season 3 screentime is an informal Bachelorette audition.
Armed with months of therapy (and all the inevitable online therapy speak that comes with it), Taylor now presides over MomTok as less of a whirling dervish, and more a Founding Mother committed to the broader vision. Yes, she’s betrayed once again through her on-again, off-again dalliance with her baby daddy Dakota Mortensen, but seeking love in the face of heartbreak is the quintessential Bachelorette origin story.
With Taylor somewhat off the board as a major character, her fellow cast members shoulder the bulk of Season 3’s drama. Jessi Ngatikaura’s social standing is in danger after the others catch word of an emotional affair. Meanwhile, exiled former MomTok member Demi Engemann has accused Marciano of being a sexual predator and remains convinced that he and Jessi were an item. Although she has an ally in fellow ex-MomTok star Whitney Leavitt, Demi’s attempts to win over castmates Mayci Neeley and Mikayla Matthews by invoking their own histories with sexual abuse only alienate her further.
Secret Lives has never shied away from touching on how its leads are affected by more serious issues of mental health and abuse, even if indirectly. In Season 2, the women’s confessional interview comments about battling the patriarchy and shaking up the Mormon Church through MomTok were often uncomfortably juxtaposed against far heavier moments of them dealing with the insidious ways that misogyny and traditional gender roles inform their own lives.
Scenes of Taylor being relentlessly slut shamed by her family when Dakota cheats on her or cast member Jen Affleck sobbing over a positive pregnancy test after nearly separating from her verbally domineering husband Zac were genuinely difficult-to-watch reminders of the havoc that the conservative systems of control often marketed to young women manage to wreak on even its more privileged members.
It seems like Secret Lives’ creative team also realized that these kinds of scenes made the whole viewing experience a bummer. For the most part, Season 3 is considerably lighter on its feet. There are still heavier conversations, but some of the most memorable involve individual women taking steps to heal from their lingering traumas.
One episode follows Layla Taylor, MomTok’s only non-white member, as she searches for the rare Black hairstylist in Utah and opens up about the difficulties of being deemed “whitewashed” in a faith that once described Black skin as a curse.
In another, Mikayla visits an EMDR therapist to unpack how past childhood sexual abuse and abstinence culture contribute to intimacy struggles in her marriage. These moments don’t absolve conservative-aligned influencers from helping popularize heteronormative, regressive ideas about gender, but odds are, a not-insignificant portion of the audience can relate to them regardless.
Season 3’s back half is also buoyed by the women’s glitzy media tour, filmed just before Season 2 of Secret Lives dropped last summer. There’s a fun novelty to watching them audition for Dancing With the Stars (another ABC property) and rub shoulders with Lana Del Rey at Stage Coach that even disputes with Demi and Whitney can’t diminish.
The one thorn in Season 3’s side? That would be DadTok. The women are the clear stars of the show, making regular detours to their male partners’ sad sack meetings a chore. We’ve seen many of these men verbally and emotionally bulldoze their wives, bristling at their more successful spouses while enjoying the fruits of their labor.
“It’s sad that you don’t feel like MomTok supports a lot of [our] relationships,” Zac whines after Jessi contemplates leaving Jordan. “I’m all for women empowerment. I just think it’s sad that all these women have families and that’s not the number one thing they’re fighting for.”
Secret Lives’ cast aren’t the most devout Mormons out there, but one can only hope that their increasing sojourns outside of Utah will help the women in toxic, one-sided relationships look past the limits of their marriage-minded community.
They certainly didn’t sign up to be placeholders for our raging discourses about rising cultural conservatism and the future of influencer culture, either. But with infinite seasons’ worth of reality hedonism on the horizon, no show is more accidentally relevant right now.
