Hello, and welcome to Group Chat, where culture reporters Rebecca Jennings and Alex Abad-Santos discuss the topics currently blowing up our (and probably your) phones.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is really about coworkers who hate each other
Why is Utah the epicenter of reality TV?
Today we’re discussing the recently released Hulu reality TV show, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and its predecessor, Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which just kicked off its fifth season.
Why are there so many pop cultural artifacts around Mormon women right now, and why are we so fascinated by them?
Mormon Wives focuses on a group of Utahn TikTokers whose content extols the virtues of motherhood as they jockey for fame on the platform; Real Housewives follows Bravo’s tried-and-true format of filming a small coterie of loosely affiliated women who are forced to party and travel together. Both of these shows are huge — the former was Hulu’s most-watched unscripted premiere of 2024, and the latter is coming off one of the wildest arcs in reality history.
In our discussion, we chat about the links between Mormonism and influencing, why the decline in religious participation might be making us hungrier for stories like these, and why so many Utah women have the exact same hair extensions and why that might be the key to their success on TikTok. Read on for the rest.
Rebecca Jennings: Okay, so, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. What do we think are the major secrets of this show?
Alex Abad-Santos: Hmm. Is one of the secrets that these women are pretty normal? Obviously they have some off-camera scandals, but what’s being filmed is relatively mundane. They’re all also incredibly similar to one another. They all have Stanley water bottles and Goyard bags. They all have the same Pottery Barn-esque interior design aesthetic. So much of the show is watching them drive everywhere (which one probably has to do in Utah) and eating, and not actually doing anything secret or scandalous.
Rebecca: Which, you’d think would make for quite a boring reality TV show. Alas!
Alex: Their “girls’ trip” is going to a hotel room and going to the hotel pool, which is what happens on a high school trip.
Rebecca: What struck me is how they all kind of talk and act like teenagers, right? They’re going to Vegas, but they’re hanging out in their room wearing matching sweatsuits. They go get soda at these soda drive-thrus called Swig.
They talk about what their husbands will allow them to do and what they won’t allow them to do. They feel so young, even though they’re all in their late 20s or early 30s, and that’s a bit weird.
Alex: Speaking of husbands, is another one of the secrets, perhaps, how many of these women are in loveless marriages?
Rebecca: 100 percent. I think 100 percent of them are in loveless marriages. And they say over the course of the show that a major problem within their culture is that they tend to get married before their brains can fully develop and they get married just because they want to have sex.
Can we keep doing this as our job, being a fake group of friends convincingly and getting brands to want to sponsor us?
Alex: So much of the show is spent on spotlighting the various scandals that their husbands or boyfriends are a part of — domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies, porn addiction, and being on Tinder — and so much of it is brought up by the women gossiping about it behind each other’s backs.
I want to ask, do you think the Mormon wives are even friends? Would they be hanging out if it weren’t for the show?
Rebecca: They all seem to hate each other, and they have this very weird competitiveness. In order for the show to make sense, they have to keep telling you that they are in a weird, nebulous TikTok group. This is why, over and over again, you hear the cast members wondering, “Will MomTok survive this?” to the point that it’s become a meme. Because if they didn’t have this brand-able TikTok group, they would have no reason to hang out together. They would realize they devote far more attention to judging one another and comparing themselves versus actually being friends.
Alex: That isn’t that different from the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or any other reality franchise. They say they’re all friends, but they’re contractually obligated to hang out and be filmed and produce storylines for the show. These shows take on a meta quality in which you’re watching this artificial performance of friendship, but also this very real, cutthroat, coworker animosity just below the surface.
Rebecca: It becomes very clear that the stakes of this are not whether MomTok will survive but that these women know they’re more sellable together. They need to keep up appearances so that they can keep getting brand deals because all of them are the breadwinners in their relationship. They know that they need to keep making videos with each other, and this is the propulsive element of the show. Can we keep doing this as our job, being a fake group of friends convincingly and getting brands to want to sponsor us?
Alex: TikTok is your wheelhouse, and I’ve wondered a lot about this reality show/TikTok dynamic. My question is: If someone is so popular on Tiktok, why do they need to be on a reality show where they can’t do the editing, they can’t do the producing? Isn’t TikTok the ultimate reality show? Unless MomTok is in trouble, there’s no reason to be on a reality show promoting MomTok, right?
Rebecca: For a while, everyone was saying social media was going to eliminate the need for movies and television and old-school fame. But increasingly, what we’ve seen is that influencers always want to translate over into mainstream entertainment because they know that the platforms could be gone in a second. TikTok just had a pretty serious day in court that might result in the app being banned in the US. Creators know that if an algorithm gets tweaked or if a platform goes away, they don’t really have anything to fall back on, and so reality TV stardom feels more stable versus relying on an algorithm.
This is also a problem on the Real Housewives, where watching it, you often get the feeling that these women are singing for their supper. They remain “friends” solely so that they can have allies on the show and people who are willing to film with them. It’s a common issue that reality shows, once they air for long enough, run into: You have two cast members who hate each other so much that you simply cannot film anything that’s worth watching. It’s why Vanderpump Rules is currently on a break, and why the Real Housewives of New Jersey is in such a weird and frustrating place.
Alex: How much of the entertainment value of this show is not being able to tell any of the women apart?
These shows take on a meta quality in which you’re watching this artificial performance of friendship
Rebecca: There’s something fascinating about these really similar-looking women, with all these long curly extensions and not quite blonde, not quite brunette hair, with the Botox and the lip filler.
Alex: It’s uncanny watching eight or so women — with the same haircut and similar faces — talk to each other, and then having no reminders of which one is which and who is talking to who. As we speak, I do not know the difference between Demi and Jess.
Rebecca: I saw a tweet that said once you are able to start telling the Mormon Wives apart, they should cut off your internet access. And I agree. Yes, they should.
Alex: What do you think of this pop culture fascination with Utah? Bravo has Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and greenlit a new real estate show. These shows sell the state as this strangely liminal space that feels very restricted and repressed but, at the same time, is also so extremely weird and unserious.
Rebecca: Physically, it is so interesting to watch. Every time they walk into a house, it looks like the scene from Grease where they sing “Beauty School Dropout.” It’s all white. Everything is white. There are these white tufted couches and it’s just so white in so many ways. Utah is 75 percent white and 50 percent Mormon.
Utah is absolutely having such a moment
Utah is absolutely having such a moment. It’s likely for the same reason Utah has pumped out so many influencers: The Mormon church prioritizes the performance of lifestyle. Mormon women essentially invented mommy blogging because they were so good at marrying that performance with this sense of enterprise a lot of Mormons are taught. The same thing that makes them successful missionaries makes them great salespeople.
Alex: I have friends in my life that are deeply invested in trad wife influencers, many of whom are indeed Mormon and/or live in Utah, like Ballerina Farm. To be fair, I’m not sure if Ballerina Farm is a person or a compound or a psy-op experiment, but there’s certainly a deep interest, a part of it unironically aspirational, in this type of luxury “traditional” life.
Rebecca: I think we’re so interested because people — especially women — are less and less religious now, and we get to see this culture that’s so defined by its religion. These are just average basic white women, but they’re really, really tied in with this religion that has a lot of mystery around it.
Alex: Any place where Lisa Barlow comes from, I’d want to know more.
Rebecca: Ah yes, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s greatest export! She’s one of the best reality TV stars that we’ve had in the past decade. Thank god for Utah.
Alex: With the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and now the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, do you feel like you have a better understanding of Utah and Mormonism than before these reality shows aired?
Rebecca: I mean, I knew a little bit about Mormons and Mormonism, but the feel of Utah and how, again, sterile and kind of uncannily perfect everything is meant to be — I found that very illuminating to watch on screen.
I also naively assumed before the Real Housewives of SLC that anyone who was a practicing Mormon would be skeptical of participating in a secular TV show where they had no control over how they came across. Lo and behold, Mormonism, just like any religion, has a plethora of human beings and a beautiful tapestry of lifestyles within it.
Alex: What I think really drives these shows is whenever you start explaining storylines to a newbie, you sound absurd.
“Oh, the woman who did the RSV TikTok dance” or “the woman who is a swinger and got arrested for domestic violence and is pregnant with the man she allegedly attacked” or “Mary Crosby married her step-grandfather.” Everything you say out of the context of these shows makes you sound a little bit unhinged.
Rebecca: Absolutely. As a student of human behavior, it’s so wonderful to watch.
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