Netflix's New No. 1 Show Left Me Flabbergasted. The “Lesbian Sex” Is Just the First Problem.

At first, The Hunting Wives looks like any other trashy murder series. It opens with a flash-forward scene of a murder in the woods, foreshadowing the central mystery of the series, then brings us to the present to lay on the exposition as thick as chile con queso: Young mother Sophie (Brittany Snow) has just relocated from New England to Texas for her husband Graham's job, and the culture shock is debilitating.

How do we know this? The Hunting Wives , which debuted on Netflix last week, never risks a moment of subtlety. On their way to a party at his boss's mansion, which turns out to be an unanticipated NRA fundraiser, Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) assures an anxious Sophie that she'll do fine, that she's good with people. “I'm not good with Texas people,” she protests. “They don’t get me.”

Message received! This will be a show, we quickly understand, about an outsider showing up and failing to fit in. About a small town where respectable facades hide shameful secrets. About extramarital affairs, a missing teenage girl, and a high school sports star with a bright future ahead of him. All to be expected from a mid-budget murder drama.

But about five minutes into the first episode, things take a turn for the weird. When Sophie enters the mansion to find a restroom, the housewife of the big boss, Margo (a glamorously outfitted Malin Åkerman) is already in there. She asks Sophie if she can borrow a pad. Margo is unable to use tampons for some reason, she says—more on that in the final episode—so how does she end up caught without a pad in her own home? And what makes her think a random guest at her party, who she's never met in her life, would be carrying one to spare?

The jarringly implausible moment is engineered in part as a setup for what happens next: Margo removes her dress in front of Sophie, fully revealing her breasts, and shoves some toilet paper in her black lace underwear. It's an encounter of menstrual intimacy just a few steps down from the tampon assist Miranda July wrote into All Fours .

Having established a dynamic of sexual tension between the two women, Hunting Wives goes on to deliver the most unabashedly, almost comically sex-crazed show in recent television . The eight-episode series, based on a 2021 novel by May Cobb, depicts a plot full of clichés—the youth pastor in a beanie, the marriage that's never been the same since a pregnancy loss, the right-wingers habitually betraying their religious and political ideals—with loads of secretive, manipulative, and occasionally passionate sex.

Tea holder women are a hard-partying clique in thrall to Margo's flirtatious daddy energy. They are caricatures of the matriarchs of well-to-do red America: One is married to the town pastor, another to the Joe-Arpaio-wannabe sheriff, and Margo to the conservative gubernatorial candidate Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). They get group Botox in their living rooms, go boar hunting in their blowouts, then retire to a well-appointed cabin to take photos with their assault rifles. Church is a nonnegotiable social opportunity; traditional family structures are their kink. “We don’t work,” one of the crew says. “We wife.”

Margo's marriage is a bit more modern. “Open marriages are for liberals,” she scoffs, but she and Jed have an agreement: Both can have sex with other women, and she can't sleep with other men. The (alleged) maintenance of Jed as the sole man in their sexual network lends the technically queer arrangement a distinctly heterosexual odor. It's a believably MAGA angle on polyamory.

It also supports the show's raison d'être, which is to cram in the maximum amount of smooching and sex between as many combinations of people as possible. The Hunting Wives pretends to be a show about a murder mystery, but it's actually about some people's hands groping their way into other people's pants. In the first two episodes, flies get unzipped and re-zipped with such frequency, I expected someone to break an artificial fingernail. When there is sexual dialogue, it's straight out of softcore porn. “There can be no evidence,” Margo says as she prepares to go down on a man who isn't her husband (oops!). “So I'm gonna have to swallow.”

The Hunting Wives is so devoted to its sexual plots that it asks us to suspend everything we know about actual human sexuality. Twice, characters engage in spur-of-the-moment masturbation while scrolling through a sexual interest's tedious, unsexy selfies on Instagram. Two high school bros, who are barely 18, are treated by adult women as irresistible sex objects. Somehow, they prove capable of making these women moan in immediate, uncontainable ecstasy—as if a teenage boy could ever.

There are absurd moments outside the bedroom, too. The cast exhibits six or seven different ways to botch a Texas accent. When Sophie disappears for an entire night, her husband only calls her five times and doesn't make any effort to look for her. Shameless brand placement ends to ludicrous dialogue, as when Sophie eats a grape and marvels, “These are good. Are they from Whole Foods?”

But the strangest part about The Hunting Wives has been the media reaction, which has lasered in on Margo's flings with Sophie and another friend in the clique. The Daily Beast dubbed it a “ lesbian show .” One queer culture site published a roundup of the series' “ 9 spiciest lesbian moments ,” several of which don't include so much as a kiss. Another called it “ the gayest show of the year .”

This framing does not align with the show I watched, in which precisely none of the characters are lesbian or gay, except maybe the butch cop who appears twice in the background, out of focus, at the police station. (You can not sneak a butch cop past these eagle eyes.) All of the women engaging in same-gender assignments have husbands, and all are shown enjoying sex with men. They never label themselves, but one imagines that they might identify as, at most, bisexual.

For a show that contains a silly amount of sex and has gotten so much press for being queer, there is precious little intersection between the two. Over eight episodes, Hunting Wives contains just two instances of women having sex with each other, plus one aborted attempt and a threesome presented as a birthday gift for a man. Meanwhile, there are more straight sex scenes than I care to count. (It depends on what you consider sex , but my back-of-the-condom-wrapper calculation brings me to about 11.) In a screenwriting decision I took as a personal insult on behalf of the lesbian community, the only time a strap-on appears, a woman is using it on a man.

In fact, there are just as many “spicy” incestual moments as there are fully fleshed-out scenes of sapphic sex. In one, a God-fearing mother pointedly eyes her teenage son's package as he steps out of the shower, and he doesn't seem to mind. It's the incest-est show of the year! (Just kidding, White Lotus .)