The New Yorker:

The women of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” seem desperate to achieve a perfect blend of contemporary womanhood: strong and soft, a loving mother and a boss bitch, a hot influencer who always puts God first.

By Naomi Fry

It makes a lot of sense that the lives of popular TikTok stars would serve as irresistible fodder for reality television. The combination of attention-courting, attractive-looking subjects experiencing sudden, tenuous fame, and the tensions that arise from the panopticon-like social-media showground in which they operate, tends to make for diverting drama. (The fact that these figures are already I.P. with a proven track record doesn’t hurt.) In recent years, we’ve had Netflix’s “Hype House,” which followed a gang of content-creating youth, beefing and gyrating day in and day out in a Ventura County McMansion share, and Hulu’s “The D’Amelio Show,” which charted the challenges that the influencer sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio faced after moving to Los Angeles to pursue new heights of social-media success.

And now we have the eight-part series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” also on Hulu, which focusses on a clutch of Utah women who are, to a greater or lesser extent, affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and also members of what they refer to as MomTok. These young wives and mothers—all smooth, flowing hair and sculpted faces—document their everyday lives on TikTok while also sharing suggestive dance videos and healthy dollops of sponsored brand content. “MomTok is essentially a content-creator house, except for we don’t actually live together,” Mayci, a blond mother of two who is a practicing Mormon as well as a self-proclaimed “bad bitch,” tells the camera.

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