Wives vs. ’Wives

Like so many Bravoholics barely enduring the fallow period where we only had RHODubai and RHOC to sustain us, I’ve been talking a lot about The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the recent reality hit about a group of Mormon influencers in Utah. (Hulu says the show had its most-watched premiere for an unscripted show this year. Take that, Vanderpump Villa.) Naturally, many of those conversations have drifted toward another set of Mormon wives we all know and love: A friend recently asked if I thought that the popularity of the show might eat into the audience for The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which had its triumphant return just this week, and there have been plenty of people on Elon Musk’s internet saying that Bravo missed out on either casting these women or creating this show.

I also got into an old-fashioned flame war with a hot (but wrong) personal trainer from San Diego when I said Mormon Wives wasn’t upscale enough for Bravo: We never see the outside of the women’s homes, and we never see them go to fancy restaurants, or any restaurants really. Yes, Mormon Wives shares some broad qualities with RHOSLC — a cast that is involved with the church, women squabbling about their place in a joint enterprise, a troublemaker named Whitney who is the only one in the group with a bob — but it looks, acts, and feels like a very different show. Whitney Leavitt wants to homestead and is picking up horse shit; Whitney Rose would never. It’s a different caliber of production from Bravo, not just in the casting and storytelling, but also in the sheen that we’ve come to associate with the network’s products.

This is speculation, but I’m betting that Bravo was offered Mormon Wives and passed. How can I tell? Know the big jump in time between the first and second episodes where Taylor Frankie Paul is suddenly about eight months pregnant? I would assume that the production company made a pilot, shopped it around, people passed — including Bravo — and it ended up, a year later, getting a green light from Hulu. If this was really meant to be a Bravo show, that whole pilot episode would have been scrapped and redone: “I wouldn’t even have let the pilot air as is,” a producer friend who worked with Bravo in the past told me. “Obviously arcs aren’t meant to be resolved in the pilot, but they didn’t do a good job of clearly planting the seeds for us to get fully invested. It would’ve gone through easily three more passes before air on Bravo.”

Watching Mormon Wives — which definitely gets better the further you get into it — I was reminded less of Real Housewives than of Jersey Shore. Much like Snooki and the gang, this is really a show that is interested in exploring, explaining, and exploiting a subculture. Yes, Mormonism has always been at the heart of RHOSLC, but we never get discussions about who is or isn’t wearing their garments, we don’t see them explaining why soda shops are so important to Utah’s culture, and we don’t see their husbands freaking the fuck out over just stepping into the same building as some Chippendales. In Mormon Wives, the church is not only front and center, it’s literally in the title of the show.

For another distinguishing element, look to the other part of that title, the Wives themselves. Fans love to joke that it’s impossible to tell the Mormon Wives apart; I especially enjoyed the episode where they wore matching sweatshirts at a sleepover with their names emblazoned on the front, perhaps the only scene where I could actively tell the difference between Demi Engemann and Jessi Ngatikaura. There was a brief interval when I had the same problem with Meredith Marks and Lisa Barlow, but that was quickly alleviated because they were both so clearly different: Meredith loves to get mad about the stupidest thing and then disengage and Lisa Barlow is a narcissist who loves fast food even more than she loves to rant. Even when it’s pulling from a shared community, Bravo casting prioritizes individual characters first and foremost.

The Mormon Wives are a little harder to differentiate because, much like the “guidos” on Jersey Shore, they’re all representatives of a specific and narrowly defined subculture. Yes, they’re all individuals — and only Whitney Leavitt is delusional enough to think she could leave a group chat and then the people in the group chat would reach out to see what’s wrong — but they all seem like different shades of the same person, which isn’t helped by the fact that they don’t get personal storylines like the Housewives do. Yes, we get some brief glimpses into their marriages or businesses, but they’re always in group scenes, always doing things together, whereas we always get to see full-time Housewives up to no good on their own as well as with the collective.

Speaking of the collective, the women of Salt Lake City benefit from the long line of Housewives that come before them. When RHOSLC debuted, we knew why these women had come together — to make a Housewives show —and they have been fully invested in that project ever since. As a new series, Mormon Wives needed its own organizing principle, and it opted to carve that niche out of #MomTok. The series’s central question is whether “#MomTok can survive this,” as they ask every episode like Carrie Bradshaw at her laptop, but just watching the show it’s hard to know what #MomTok even is, much less why they all care about it like Angie K cares about gigantic sunglasses; we see a few clips of them making content, but not the effects of it. I wish that instead of the few brief TikToks we see of the women at the brand trip to California that Whitney mentions when she’s explaining Demi and the Fruity Pebbles, the Mormon Wives cameras had actually followed them to the event and captured that backstory for the show. (I still don’t entirely understand this drama, but I do know that Whitney’s gift was mean girl behavior at its finest.) That could have given us a better sense of #MomTok’s popularity, the money that it makes, the influence it has.

That kind of stuff is baked into the Housewives formula thanks to pioneers like Bethenny Frankel: Heather Gay & Co. signed up to get famous, get their businesses seen, get their proverbial bag. Why are the Mormon Wives doing #MomTok and, by extension, why are they on this show? Without answering those questions, Mormon Wives’ #MomTok fixation just exists as this kind of vague idea that may or may not have been created for reality television. Bravo did this very thing ages ago when it turned the vague idea of a “Real Housewife” into a phenomenon, and I have faith that Mormon Wives can get there too, but the question of why it exists both as a program and for the women inside it still needs to be answered.

Could a second season of Mormon Wives improve on some of these existential issues and make it even better? Sure could. I would suggest cutting the cast by at least two women, giving them a bit more solo camera time so that we can see them as individuals, and showing more of the business aspects of #MomTok and illustrating why its survival is integral to these women’s lives. All of those improvements would make Mormon Wives better than it already is, but it still won’t be a Bravo show — and that’s perfectly fine. For my money, RHOSLC will always be superior, but both can exist in their own corners of the reality TV universe and both be great. Not everything needs to be like Bravo to be good, and not everything fans think is good needs to be on Bravo. Internet stan culture loves to pit public figures against each other, especially women, but these series don’t need to fight in order to both be successful. Now let’s just hope we’re blessed with a renewal order.