Binge or Cringe: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Do you really want to know The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives?

It’s official: Hulu has renewed The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives for a second season. Pre-production is already underway, and filming is expected to begin in Utah before the end of the year.

Hulu obviously wasn’t going to let the buzz around its most-watched new reality show of 2024 fizzle out like an unattended dirty soda (more on that in a minute). But can the #MomTok influencers of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives stir up enough scandals to fuel another eight episodes? We’ll find out in a few months.

Meanwhile, the entirety of season 1 is available right now on Hulu. If you haven’t seen it yet, is it worth watching? Read on to find out if The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives deserves a Binge (you have to see this) or a Cringe (avoid at all costs).

What The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is about

Taylor Frankie Paul, Demi Engemann, Jennifer Affleck, Jessi Ngatikaura, Layla Taylor, Mayci Neeley, Mikayla Mathews, and Whitney Leavitt are Utah Mormons who create “relatable” content on TikTok, which they’ve cleverly nicknamed MomTok. Some of them are married, some are divorced, some are remarried, and they’re all on TikTok to dispel misconceptions about Mormon women (and make piles of money, because TikTok).

Hanging over the series is the specter of a “soft swinging” scandal that Taylor Frankie Paul (let’s keep using full names because they’re too ridiculous to abbreviate) and her now ex-husband engaged in with other Mormons. Naturally, this revelation and her domestic violence arrest have soiled the rep of MomTok, leading to camera-ready drama within the group.

Not that the rest of the Wives don’t have their problems: Jennifer Affleck is under the delusion that she’s related to Ben and Casey, Layla Taylor has a crippling addiction to dirty soda (again, we’ll get to it), Whitney Leavitt is cursed with short hair, the list goes on. Over the course of the season, there’s little that’s secret about these lives.

What The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives will remind you of

Based on geography alone, the most straightforward comparison for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which is about as “real” as a certain other Utah-filmed reality series, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Based on sheer vapidity, The Kardashians also works.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a hair-extensioned clone every other reality show centered on a circle of look-at-me women, save for one detail: These ladies don’t cry and bicker over wine, they drink dirty soda (your patience is about to be rewarded).

For those outside of Utah, a dirty soda is a mocktail consisting of Sprite, Diet Coke, or another fountain drink mixed with cream, flavored syrup, or whatever else is lying around. They’re all the rage in Utah (CableTV.com is based in the Beehive State, so we know) because they’re an indulgence free of alcohol, a no-no for Mormons. A bottomless Stanley mug of type 1 diabetes is Utah’s unofficial symbol

The best part of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Except for Whitney Leavitt, all the Mormon Wives are indistinguishable from each other—same hair, same clothes, same fake dutiful housewife TikTik personas. If you ever suffer the misfortune of becoming addicted to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Hulu switches some of them out in season 6, you’ll be blissfully unaware.

The worst part of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Now the rest of the world knows about dirty soda. The end of civilization with all of its toes intact is nigh.

So, should you binge or cringe The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives?

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a hard cringe. Maybe you’d glean some minor insights into a religion you’re unfamiliar with, but there are better sources on Hulu (like Under the Banner of Heaven and Daughters of the Cult, just to name two).

Past the faith hook, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is just more of the same old reality trash. Sixty seconds on TikTok? Sure. Sixty minutes of TV? Not even for the promise of a cocktail with Andy Cohen afterward.