SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers from “The Hunting Wives,” now streaming on Netflix.
Author May Cobb never expected that her twisty 2021 thriller would be reimagined on screen. But when she met showrunner Rebecca Cutter and brought her to where she’d grown up in Texas, they immediately clicked.
Cobb says they took Cutter on a tour around Dallas to see the “Beverly Hills of Texas,” which she says is “where hunting wives might hang out.”
“Then two hours east to Longview, my hometown, and we had this magical weekend together where we went to my sister’s log cabin on the lake, which was the inspo for ’Hunting Wives,’” Cobb continues. “My brother-in-law took Rebecca on a tour so she could see East Texas, where it’s not just fishing cabins. These are very opulent, oversized — and then the next day, we all went skeet shooting. Very much like Sophie, Rebecca hit a clay pigeon on the third try. I was like, ‘You’re now officially a hunting wife.’ We bonded instantly.”
The series, which premiered on Netflix on July 21, follows Sophie (Brittany Snow), a woman from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has relocated to suburban Texas for her husband’s job. Immediately, she meets her husband’s boss Jed (Dermot Mulroney), a right-wing aspiring future governor, and his wife, Margo (Malin Åkerman). Eventually, Margo and Sophie’s relationship becomes obsessive and sexual, as their lives become intertwined.
In the book, Abby, a high school student, is murdered in the woods. Sophie finds out that, before her death, she was brought to an abortion clinic by two of the wives — Jill (the mother of Abby’s boyfriend, Brad) and Callie. Jill then killed both Abby and Margo to protect her son. Margo was also having an affair with Brad.
The show took the story in a completely different direction. While Sophie thought Abby had been pregnant and gone to an abortion clinic, it was actually Margo, who’d gotten pregnant by Brad and chose to end her pregnancy (by a doctor who happened to be her dad!). Jill (Katie Lowes), the pastor’s wife, was very publicly anti-abortion in the show, at one point telling Sophie there are no clinics left nearby, adding, “We made sure of that.” In the end, Jill was murdered as well, with the world believing she killed Abby. Only Sophie knows the truth.
Courtesy of Steve Dietl/Lionsgate
“My jaw dropped when she told me. It makes so much sense,” Cobbs says of Cutter’s ending. “My best friend was mad at me when I killed Margo in the book, and she’s still mad at me about it. She’s like, ‘Rebecca is the MVP.’ I get it. I needed another twist in the book, and that’s the one I came up with. But I thought it was genius. It’s a great twist.”
Keeping more women alive wasn’t the series’ only change; the show also had many more conversations about abortion rights. Cutter read the novel the day after SB8, the Senate bill (also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act) that prohibits physicians from performing or inducing an abortion if a fetal heartbeat is detected, had passed.
“I thought, ‘OK, well, if we’re gonna do this, let’s address some of the realities. Plus, this is kind of a fish-out-of-water story,” Cutter says. “In the book, Sophie’s from Texas, but in this version, she’s never been there, so we wanted to see if we can put it in a modern political setting and still get away with it.”
Cobb adds: “I think the conversations were more just about the sensitivity of it all, and not trying to pick a side. We wanted to show the nuance of everything as well, because there really is no black and white. It’s all gray, especially for someone who lives in Texas. It’s an astonishing spectrum here. It was the overall feeling of being sensitive, not mocking anything, not drawing some hard line in the sand, but also not shying away from it.”
The show leans very heavily into what seems to be a MAGA group of women in a gun-loving town. (The first episode’s big party at Jed and Margo’s house is sponsored by the NRA.) But the writers never wanted to take a side.
“When I was pitching this, I was asked, ‘Is this a show that both liberals and conservatives can watch?’ And I said, ‘Yes, absolutely, because I love people. I love meeting people that are different from me, similar to me, and I love all my fucked up, flawed characters equally,’” says Cutter. “My first job is never to be political or put my agenda in it. That might happen at some point, but my first job is to make characters that feel real and have psychological depth and weight. So, if everyone is telling their own truth, then that is what it is, and that’s not controversial.”
Although Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, is mentioned in passing, President Trump is never mentioned by name, a conscious choice in the writers’ room. “I didn’t want it to be so specific, but I wanted it to feel recognizable,” Cutter says. “Some people can relate to Sophie and come into it through her eyes — she’s sort of clutching her pearls by the guns and political talk and all that, but then, you’re going to fall in love with Margo just like she does. You’re going to be on that side. So it’s very humanist. You can fall in love with any of them.”
“If we’re saying that they’re MAGA gals, she’s the queen of that,” Cutter adds about Margo. “But then, she has a really sympathetic, interesting backstory, and you understand why she’s so desperate to be in power. It is an empowerment story for Sophie in some way. In some ways, she’s sort of being sold a bill of goods. There’s a lot of layers to it.”
Courtesy of Steve Dietl/Lionsgate
Making the major changes to the book was a daunting task. Cutter’s favorite thing about the novel was that Sophie was both being framed by Margo and attracted to her at the same time. “I was literally on the edge of my seat. How do you pull off that, because she’s kind of the most obvious suspect?” she says. “It’s like pulling it off in plain sight, because she comes off as guilty before anyone’s even been killed! She just comes off as a villain. So I was like, I don’t know if we’re gonna pull this off.”
Although it’s a bit early to talk about a potential Season 2, both are hopeful and the ideas have started ruminating.
“I think we’d do a little bit of a time jump — not a year, but a time. By the end of shooting, I realized that the two engines of the show are the whodunit and the Margo/Sophie relationship, and tracking how those spines intersect with each other,” says Cutter. “The first thing I’m thinking about is, where are these two women at the start? Where are they at the end? What are the peaks and valleys of their individual power, of their relationship? So it’s tracking a course for that, and then figuring out what the crime engine is.”
So, Cutter adds, “I think it would be smart” to introduce a new murder mystery. But it’s early stages. “I don’t know whodunit yet or who got done!”
