I lost track of how many times I heard the C-word in the first few episodes of the new season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
That C-word: clout.
鈥淗e鈥檚 a clout chaser.鈥 “She’s clout-chasing.” Just part of the singsong in the Hulu reality series that follows a pack of Utah mom-fluencers 鈥 their bond as well as their mess, particularly after a “soft swinging” scandal that rocked the group and ended up becoming a mythos for the show.
Clout 鈥 a term that really took off in the 2010s, and is part of the lingua franca of the social media-verse 鈥 is, of course, just a new-era spin on a very old concept: social climbing. Specifically, it refers to an appetite for attention, fame and, of course, “followers” 鈥 and, on reality TV, where the term often gets tossed around, I’ve noticed, it can take on even more meta dimensions.
Seeking “clout” can also be akin to wanting “a moment,” which also comes up often on “Mormon Wives” 鈥 especially now that the women on the show are famous. Tons more famous than when they were just “regular moms” filming the first season!
The show, after all, became a full-on phenom last fall when it debuted, becoming the first Hulu unscripted series to chart in the streaming rankings and making #MomTok part of the vernacular. It’s had an interesting runway since, getting a whole second round of viewers when ABC later re-aired it all in prime time, repurposing it for “linear TV,” as they call it.
Within weeks of that show dissolving into the zeitgeist, the women of the show 鈥 Jennifer Affleck, Demi Engemann, Taylor Frankie Paul, Whitney Leavitt, Mikayla Matthews, Mayci Neeley, Jessi Ngatikaura and Layla Taylor 鈥 even landed their own US Weekly cover that read “Sex, Lies, and A Swinging Scandal.”
And that is not even yet taking into account the moolah! As one of the gals now says in the first episode of this latest season, her husband’s entire yearly salary is equivalent to what one of them makes on one brand deal. Something, in fact, that flows into the larger sub-narrative on the show: how these women negotiate their value vis聽脿 vis the men in their lives, the whole of it being a kind of peek into “toxic masculinity,” in some cases, but also run-of-the-mill “patriarchy” in others.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a theme with our church 鈥 everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.鈥 That’s what Demi, one of the more progressive Mormons on the show, famously said in the first season 鈥 a theme that permeates and deepens during this followup. See: Mikayla, who is 25 and has three children, the first of whom she had at 17. Or Jen, who married her husband at 19 and has two.
At one point in the new season, someone says, about the number of children in vogue in these parts: 鈥淭hree is the new six in Utah.”
Noted.
For all the bleakness that is omnipresent in the show, however, and some of the graver matters it raises about the LDS Church, it is even juicier this time 鈥檙ound. Believe me. Even as it gets more deliciously and absurdly self-aware. Like, with Whitney, who was on the outs with “MomTok” the last we saw her, and who matter-of-facts early on in a confessional, 鈥淐an we please have a new villain? It can鈥檛 be me!鈥
Likewise, when a fight breaks out between two of the men on the show during a house party,聽in one of the early eps, and the police are called 鈥 the cameras capturing it all 鈥 one of the gals made me LOL harder than I have in ages when she tried explaining the crazy web of relationships and feuds in their friend-group to a cop. Exasperated, she finally asks the officer, “Do you watch ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’?”
A moment of reality seeping into TV churning yet more reality.
And part of the success of the series, according to executive producer Jeff Jenkins. 鈥淭hey share like Kim Kardashian back in the early days when 99 per cent of (her) life was on camera,” he recently told the Hollywood Reporter.
And he would know: Jenkins was also once an EP on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and its various spinoffs.
Previewing the new season, this also hit me: “Mormon Wives” may just be the truest post-pandemic show, in that it grew out of the TiKTok wave and “working from home” trend that quadrupled during those quarantine times.
You know that meme that regularly goes around and is a variation on this: “Going to Work Because I Was Too Shy to Dance on TikTok in 2020”? Well, that is MomTok.
Work and play and pray. All mixed up! All that and a lot more clout.
All episodes of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” Season 2 stream Thursday in Canada on Disney Plus.
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