The “Mormon Wives” will never be Housewives.
The “Mormon Wives” will never be Housewives.
“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is desperately trying to copy Bravo’s “Real Housewives” formula, but they’re missing one thing: personality.
With “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” announcing a spin off set in Orange County, the comparisons to Bravo TV’s “Real Housewives” franchise have been more rampant than ever.
On the surface, it makes sense. Both “The Real Housewives” (2006) and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (2024) franchises center on friend groups of women; they’re both constantly surrounded by scandal, and now, both franchises have shows in Salt Lake City and Orange County, California.
The Real Housewives franchise started in Orange County and has expanded with 11 other shows in different areas, including Salt Lake City, which has quickly become the fan favorite of the franchise. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives franchise started in Salt Lake and has just expanded to Orange County, promising to give viewers a more “revealing” side of Mormonism. Influencer Bobbi Althoff is on the spinoff, so viewers may get a cameo from Sukihana, a Love and Hip Hop Star and Althoff’s podcast partner.
The Housewives’ casts are made up of complex women who have already lived interesting lives. The Mormon wives on the other hand, consists of repressed 20 to 30-something-year-old TikTokers who are living their “rebellious phase” 15 years too late.
Both shows serve their purpose as unabashed reality TV escapism, but when you look past the pure spectacle of the Mormon wives’ franchise (they can’t drink caffeine, but are more than willing to try ketamine?) you’re left with little to no substance.
The reason so many people fell in love with the Real Housewives was because of how complex the women are. Each housewife has lived an interesting, compelling life of their own before joining the show. Even when they’re putting on for the cameras, a la Kyle Richards, there’s a glimpse of real humanity. And for every Kyle, there’s a Garcelle Beauvais ready to call her out.
The “TikTokification” of reality TV strips its character. When half of the drama unfolds on social media, the show feels incomplete. For pure escapism, a good reality show should allow viewers to sit back and watch interesting women fight and make up, rather than requiring them to follow each cast member on TikTok just to understand the plot.
You can tell when the Mormon wives are desperately trying to have a viral moment – to the point where it evokes second-hand embarrassment. Most of the Housewives franchises predate TikTok, so they’re less self-commodified in their speech.
When the “Real Housewives of New York” rebooted their cast for season 14, they added a few influencers to the cast, and it flopped so bad they had to reboot again after season 15 (the current cast is amazing, by the way).
We do not need social media influencers on reality TV. Their entire job is to curate their public personas and that makes for an incredibly boring watch when you’re used to real, complicated and imperfect women.
The Mormon Wives are influencers first, reality TV stars second. They know how to curate their lives for cameras; it’s what they do best. Their scandals are interesting in theory, but never play out well on camera- the cast is too self-produced. Hearing that Taylor Frankie Paul throws chairs at her baby daddy makes the show sound promising, yet once you start watching, it’s just her crying on a couch with her friends and yelling at anyone who wants to hold her accountable. It’s basically reality TV clickbait; it’s all vapid and shallow, even when the topic at hand is hefty.
The Mormon wives also aren’t smart enough to compete with the Housewives. One of the best parts of the Housewives’ dynamic is their sharp, witty reads (Jackie Goldschneider from New Jersey asking Teresa Giudice if she got her confidence from jail will always have me on the floor). Even the dullest of Housewives knows how to read someone down. When one of the Mormon wives tries her hand at reading one of her cast mates, it falls flat because none of them understand it. These are women who, for the most part, are under 30 years old and never went to college. They don’t have the education nor the real-world experience to understand anything past their immediate line of vision.
And the thing is, it has nothing to do with Mormonism. “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” is one of the best reality TV shows of all time, and a lot of them are Mormon or at least ex-Mormon. The difference between the casts is the housewives have lived long enough to develop their own interesting personalities outside of their relationships with other people.
The drama on “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” almost always involves somebody’s relationship with a man, and it gets tiring quickly. That’s not to say the Housewives don’t have their fair share of boy problems, but they are so much more than their partners. In fact, the entire point of the show from the beginning was to show that housewives can have complicated lives outside of their families.
The hope for this new chapter of the Mormon wives is that it avoids becoming a simple rehash of old Orange County drama. While the trailer promises a less pretentious vibe than its predecessor, success remains to be seen.
is a contributor to The NewsHouse.