Sexy memes of sapphic desire began proliferating in late July when creator Rebecca Cutter’s The Hunting Wives dropped on Netflix. Photos of Malin Åkerman’s Texan temptress Margo licking salt off Brittany Snow’s buttoned-up Sophie appeared alongside thirsty captions. Queer women and beyond shared in the comments about what they’d want either of those characters to do to them. The story of a fish-out-of-water New England elite entranced by a libidinous Texan in a so-called conservative community elicited communal desire, and it made jaws drop over its wild plot.
“I loved the horniness of the book. I love how…everyone was just doing everything, didn't have a real moral hangup about anything,” Cutter tells Out about May Cobb’s 2021 novel. “I thought Sophie's kind of in love with Margo, but also she thinks she's framing her, and I love anything that’s like, both things are happening at once.”
Word of mouth propelled the series to the top of the streaming charts, where it remained at number 1, according to Luminate, which tracks the total minutes shows are streamed. For all its guns, booze, Xanax, queer sex, wigs, dildos, and murder, the series became a welcome, zeitgeisty distraction from the daily news, even as it tackled hot-button topics like immigration, abortion, and female sexual agency.
By August, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers dedicated a segment to the show on their Las Culturistas podcast, and iconoclast Gabbey Windey addressed her love for the series on her podcast, Long Winded. “Horny and porny,” she called it, adding that she’d received a DM from someone who said that porn was banned in their state. They were using The Hunting Wives in its place. Featuring otherwise conservative women in open and queer relationships and pegging their husbands, the series afforded viewers escape and pleasure.
“I'm so grateful to see such a grateful response from the queer community, a curious and excited response from, what I feel like, is straight women on TikTok. I love that we don't have to define it,” Cutter says. “I’ve been married to an amazing man for a long time. I’ve also had relationships with women in the past. Let's just all be curious.”
“Let’s let the women who are watching the show be curious about themselves, see what they see in the show, and what a lovely thing to have happened this summer,” she adds. “Among so many terrible things, if for a few seconds you get to be distracted and turned on by sexy women, great.”
Malin Åkerman as Margo and Brittany Snow as Sophie in The Hunting Wives Kent Smith
Now renewed for a second season, The Hunting Wives is Cutter’s second series with prominent queer characters. Her crime drama Hightown ran on Starz (where The Hunting Wives was originally set to run). Set in Provincetown and starring Monica Raymund as a lesbian fisheries agent who stumbles across a dead body on the beach, drugs, corruption, and plenty of queer sex ensued on the series for three seasons. With Hunting Wives a bona fide smash, new audiences are discovering Hightown, also available on Netflix. And Cutter says it’s been one of the most exciting pieces of the new show’s success.
“[Hightown] was my first show. I was a first-time showrunner. It was very, very personal to me. It was not from IP. It was an original idea. So that was my little baby,” Cutter says. “They [her shows] obviously share some DNA.”
Some of that shared DNA is hot, believable sex between women. Sophie and Margo’s chemistry is palpable from the jump. Their first scene together occurs in the bathroom of Margo’s home, where the Texan and her big-shot husband, Jed (Dermot Mulroney), are throwing a party. Outside with guests, he cheerfully touts guns and villainizes immigrants, while Sophie happens upon Margo, all confidence and sex appeal in an emerald-hued dress.
"Malin was the first person we cast. To me, that was the thing that if you didn't have your Margo, the story kind of falls apart, because you have to be able to believe that this is a woman who is so self-assured and so charismatic and so sexy that anyone can fall in love with her," Cutter says of casting her leads.
"Brittany was also our first choice because she brings the vulnerability, but the sort of everywoman that you can see through," she adds. "But also, I knew that she could go on that journey as Sophie, where she starts out really small and gets to really blossom in a kind of crazy way throughout the season."
Though the women don’t consummate their desire until episode 4 (what feels like an eternity for thirsty viewers), Cutter was initially concerned about the pacing of their attraction.
“When I was writing it, I was worried that it was happening too fast and that people wouldn't believe it. But I think the whole show just ends up being so fast that it's not reality. You go along for the ride,” Cutter says. “I certainly believe that people can have instant attraction and act on it pretty quickly. I mean, that happens. That was my 20s.”
Margo enters Sophie’s life at a strange inflection point. The northerner has committed a crime and endured trauma that would later come to light. In a series rife with booze, drugs, crime, and beyond-missionary heterosexual sex, Sophie’s overprotective husband, Graham (Evan Jonigkeit), who bars her from drinking and/or driving, is easily that world's biggest buzzkill. The wild Texan, no stranger to her own traumatic past, offers Sophie relief from her stifling life.
The Hunting Wives Kent Smith
“[Malin] she’s just very comfortable in her body and her sexuality, and Sophie has those wide eyes, that thing where she's just absorbing everything that Malin’s putting out. And it's exactly what she needs in her life at that exact moment,” Cutter says. “She's found herself in this strange place in a marriage that's not safe or comfortable or happy, and she's made her life very small and no drinking, no driving, and she has the shame about what she's done in the past. And so she's just ripe for the picking.”
All eight episodes of The Hunting Wives are directed by women, with four directors helming two episodes each. Among them are queer legends Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, Stranger Inside) and Melanie Mayron, who starred in Thirtysomething, but went on to direct everything from the 1995 film The Baby-Sitters Club to several episodes of the original Pretty Little Liars. Mayron directed the pivotal first sex scene between Margo and Sophie, where, when finished, a sated Margo says, “It seems like you’ve done that before.”
“A decision that we made when we were rehearsing their first big sex scene was that I was like, It's so expected that Margo is the one that pulls [Sophie] into it. But to me it was like, Margot kisses her first, but that's all the permission, and now she is going to be on top and get into it and run the scene,” Cutter shares. “They both loved that idea that we're not going to do the sort of expected. Margo has led her every step of the way, but then once she has that permission, Sophie's all in, and she has her own agency.”
With a season 2 on the way, discussion about Margo and Sophie as endgame is inevitable.
“I love that idea. I am open to that idea, but obviously, it's never good TV. We move in together and get a cat, and then everything's fine,” Cutter says. “Obviously, there's going to be many twists and turns moving forward.”
A compulsive comment reader, Cutter says feedback she’s received about the show ranges from “subversive,” which she calls a “great 25-cent word,” to “soap” and “trash.” Not one to take it all too seriously, Cutter welcomes an array of responses.
“Everyone's going to have their own experience of it. But I like being called smart and subversive. I like being called dumb and lucky, whatever, I'll take it,” Cutter says.
