Fashion
‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Keeps Pushing Back TV’s Fourth Wall
Reality TV had long advised casts to pretend the cameras (and producers) weren’t there. But for the Mormon influencers of MomTok, the business of being on camera is central to the plot.
The women of MomTok, the 20- and 30-something Mormon influencers who make up the cast of Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” built their livelihood on upsetting codes of conduct.
The series’s first season was birthed in the wake of a “soft swinging” scandal involving some of its couples. A few of the cast members drink alcohol. Some abstain in keeping with the Church’s doctrine, but interpret its teachings on ketamine use more loosely.
In the show’s second season, which finished airing this month, the group routinely flouted what, in eras past, had been a cardinal rule of reality TV: Don’t break the fourth wall.
“It’s not a shock that I was a fan favorite,” Demi Engemann pointedly told to her MomTok peers in Episode 6. The group had just learned that she tried to convince producers to kick off her co-star Jessi Ngatikaura in order to secure a higher contract for this season. “I feel like I’m an asset, I should fight for more.”
That prompted Taylor Frankie Paul, the unofficial founder of MomTok, to push back about her own negotiations over the very show on which they were appearing.
“I’m the that one that’s actually struggling because I’m open to the [expletive] world,” she said. “If anyone deserves to be paid more it’s me and I’ve never even asked for that.”
