You know a show has crossed into the pop-culture mainstream when it lands a spoof on Saturday Night Live. And that’s exactly what’s happened to Netflix’s glossy murder melodrama The Hunting Wives.
For the uninitiated, the show follows Brittany Snow (played here by Chloe Fineman) as a young woman from the East Coast who relocates to East Texas with her husband after a deadly drunk-driving accident. Once there, she becomes infatuated with her husband’s boss, played in the real series by Malin Akerman — and by Amy Poehler in the sketch — as the two spiral into a mess of drugs, secrets, and a young girl’s murder.
It’s got all the ingredients of a deliciously trashy Netflix hit, somewhere between You and Yellowstone. But what it’s really famous for — and what SNL zeroes in on — is just how gay the whole thing is. “Millions of Americans tuned into season one of The Hunting Wives, the straight-but-lesbian, horny Republican murder drama,” the sketch’s narrator declares.
The parody nails every hallmark of the show: the overly sensual “teaching moments” between the lead women, gratuitous thigh-touching, terrible wigs, and — because it’s still a sudsy thriller at heart — wildly inappropriate relationships between adults and barely legal teens.
Even Aubrey Plaza pops up as a new arrival to the neighborhood, an actual lesbian whose presence isn’t exactly welcomed by the Hunting Wives themselves.
