Voltaire famously joked in the 1700s that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. A similar critique could be made of Hulu’s show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which just dropped its fourth season. The nine women who star on this incredibly popular show, a group of online influencers styling themselves #MomTok, don’t lead secret lives at all—they’re almost pathologically incapable of privacy. They mostly aren’t wives, with the show often listing their partners as “baby daddies” or exes. And while most of them grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they’re not really that Mormon.
Their real religion is something else. Since the show has started, they’ve been catapulted into becoming full-time micro-celebs with millions of followers, elevating fame instead of Joseph Smith.
As a result, their lives are so messy that, aside from the fact that filming for the show’s fifth season has been suspended, the biggest concern you have when watching the show is “How much are these people spending on therapy?” Between the nine starring women and their husbands, there are personal therapists, relationship therapists, intimacy specialists, and healing retreats.
It’s enough professional intervention to suggest that, by now, some of them ought to be fixed. And yet no one is. This season alone, two of the women separate from their husbands and contemplate divorce. One struggles with an eating disorder. What the show documents instead isn’t healing, but the performance of it.
