If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you may have already seen advertisements for the streamer’s latest drama series The Hunting Wives. The show, which was adapted from May Cobb’s best-selling novel of the same name, follows a young mother from Boston as she navigates the affluent social clubs of a fictional East Texas town, and ingratiates herself within the cultural diaspora. Along the way, she rubs elbows with a group of housewives that carry dangerous secrets, culminating in the mysterious death of a teenage girl. Though The Hunting Wives is still fresh off the presses, having released on July 21, the show has made major waves with audiences. Many fans are already demanding a season two renewal from Netflix, while others struggle to wrap their heads around the thrilling conclusion to the first eight-episode installment.
If you count yourself among the latter category, be sure to read ahead, as we unpack the plot, characters and conclusion of The Hunting Wives. We’ll also take a moment to note how the show deviates from the source material, and treads its own path. Needless to say, there will be major spoilers ahead for both the novel and the series, so be sure to bookmark this page and return later if you’re not caught all the way up to speed. With no further preamble, let’s dive right in, and see what we can learn about The Hunting Wives‘ shocking ending.
What is ‘The Hunting Wives’ all about?
The Hunting Wives begins when Sophie, a young mother from Boston, arrives at her new East Texas home. She quickly strikes up a friendship with a local woman named Margo Banks, who seems to be the head of the Mean Girls style crew of affluent neighborhood women. As the title of the series suggests, these housewives are quite fond of hunting, and take the opportunity to teach Sophie how to shoot boar and other local wildlife. While hunting is a way of life for these women, they also engage in a number of salacious sorority-inspired activities, which include partying with drugs and alcohol, inviting young men to their mansions as hedonistic party favors, and occasionally slipping into some Eyes Wide Shut erotic festivities.
Sophie faces a major learning curve to become close with these women, but ultimately overcomes her culture shock to develop a deep bond with each of them – especially Margo. She also learns that Margo’s husband, Jed, is a prominent Republican politician in the region, with ties to local police and unions all over Texas. Though Sophie is warned to keep her distance from her newfound friends, she becomes fully engrossed in the crew and winds up becoming a major suspect in the mysterious death of a local teenage girl named Abby. As it turns out, Abby was killed during the night of one of the wives’ big parties, and police identified the murder weapon as being Sophie’s newly acquired boar hunting gun. Sophie knows that she is innocent, as she passed out early that night after having too much to drink, though none of her friends seem to be able to offer any kind of an alibi.
What happened to Abby?
By the end of The Hunting Wives, the truth is finally revealed, though it’s quite complicated. Through a series of flashbacks, retellings, and investigative sequences, we learn that Margo is the true murderer. She shot Abby with Sophie’s gun, after the pair got into an argument over a boy. Apparently Margo had been sleeping with Abby’s underage boyfriend, and had even become pregnant from the affair. She aborted the child and swept the scandal under the rug to protect her reputation as well as her husband’s political career. Once Margo thought she was in the clear, however, Abby caught wind that her boyfriend was cheating on her with an adult woman, and became overcome with rage and jealousy. Abby threatened to expose the affair as well as the abortion, leading Margo to lash out and shoot her.
From there, Margo leveraged her connections to the police and local politicians to develop an alibi, hide the body and dispose of the murder weapon. Her brother was supposed to destroy the gun, though he ultimately sold it outside of town, allowing investigators to trace it back to Sophie. While Sophie awaits trial in jail, she begins to piece some of this together herself, and questions whether she was always ingratiated into the friend group to be turned into a patsy. By the end of the season, Margo reveals that she never intended for Sophie to go to jail, and that she only used her gun in the heat of passion, because it happened to be close by. Still, the truth is left ambiguous, allowing the viewer to decide for themselves if Margo is a sociopathic mastermind, or a first-time criminal in way over her head.
Unpacking episode seven’s big shootout
Episode seven of The Hunting Wives, humorously titled “Shooting Star,” is the climactic turning point for the show. In this episode, we learn that Abby’s mother, Starr, suspects another one of Margo’s Mean Girls of having killed her daughter. The woman in question is Jill, Margo’s long-time best friend and mother to Abby’s boyfriend. Starr recalls that Jill did not approve of their children dating each other, and suspects that Jill killed Abby simply to end the relationship. In a furious drunken rage. Starr grabs a gun of her own, and kicks in Jill’s front door. The other wives hear the commotion from up the street, and make it to the scene before the police can arrive, only to see that Jill has wrestled the gun away from Starr, and shot her dead in the scuffle.
Confused, terrified, and hysterical with emotions, Jill waves the gun around wildly, and nearly shoots Margo’s head clean off. Another one of the friends reacts swiftly, and shoots Jill before she can harm anyone else. That’s the reality of a friend group breakup in a city where everyone is packing heat. While everyone struggles to make heads or tails of this horrific double murder scene, Margo takes the opportunity to sneak some evidence implicating Jill as Abby’s murderer. The police then arrive and discover the evidence, exonerating Sophie. With Jill as the primary suspect, the police declare the case closed, and Margo attempts to return to business as usual.
Are Sophie and Margo still friends?
Though many of the locals are prepared to accept the narrative that Jill is a murderer and move on, Sophie still takes issue with some of the finer details. She confronts Margo at a campaign event for Jed, and demands that she explain what happened. After Sophie reveals that she has basically figured it all out, Margo concedes, and admits that she killed Abby and framed Jill. Margo pleads with Sophie to move on, and even expresses feelings of romantic love for her, but Sophie is determined to make things right. She tells Margo that she’ll be speaking to the police, prompting Margo to turn herself in instead.
Before calling the detectives assigned to the case, Margo speaks to Jed, and catches him up to speed on the entire affair, abortion saga and her role in the two murders. Jed is furious, and throws her out of the house, knowing that it would mean political suicide for this story to get out. Margo then turns to her brother, Kyle, and tells him that she plans to confess. Kyle panics, knowing that the confession would also implicate him, and commands her to drop the story once and for all. When Margo explains that Sophie knows everything, Kyle storms out of his home, and rushes to track her down too.
‘The Hunting Wives’ ending explained
In the final moments of The Hunting Wives, Kyle tracks down Sophie as she comes out of a local store. She spots him and immediately clocks that he has foul intentions, before getting in her car and high-tailing it out of there. Kyle follows her, and pit maneuvers her car clean off the side of the road. As he approaches her vehicle, he reaches for a gun, causing Sophie to panic and run him over. When she hops out of the car to check on him, she receives a call from the lead investigator of Abby’s murder. She ignores the call, and begins dumping Kyle’s body into a ravine. Meanwhile, Margo calls Kyle, and Sophie accidentally picks up his phone. She doesn’t say anything, but Margo seems to know that it’s her. Sophie hangs up, and sends Kyle’s body into the water, marking the beginning of yet another dangerous journey for the Boston transplant.
Now that season one of The Hunting Wives has concluded, there are a number of questions surrounding this ambiguous cliffhanger ending. Will Sophie be caught for Kyle’s murder? Did Margo send Kyle to intentionally kill Sophie? What will become of Jed’s political career now that this abject chaos has consumed his surroundings? And of course, most importantly, will the boar population in East Texas explode now that the gang of hard-partying housewives have been preoccupied for so long? For now, there’s no definitive answer to these questions. The closing moments of the Netflix series have sent viewers into a spiral, with many fans taking to social media to discuss the surprising twists and turns along the way.
How does the series differ from the book?
Some of the biggest talking points surrounding the Hunting Wives series are the changes made to the narrative from the original novel. While the core characters and broad strokes of the story are still the same, there are massive deviations which make the Netflix show a major shock even for long-time fans. In the book, Jill isn’t falsely accused of killing Abby by Starr – she is actually the murderer. As Starr argues in the show, Jill is perturbed by her son having a relationship with Abby, whom she views as being part of an undesirable social class. In the book, however, Jill becomes enraged when she learns that her son has gotten Abby pregnant. Abby refuses to get an abortion, so Jill murders her, and attempts to frame one of her friends. She also discovers Margo’s affair with her son, and winds up killing her as well.
Will there be a season two of ‘The Hunting Wives’?
For now, there has been no official announcement from Netflix regarding the future of The Hunting Wives. The streamer has neither cancelled the series, nor ordered a second season. Still, it seems clear that the conclusion of season one establishes a bold new direction for the show, which many fans would love to continue. Furthermore, we can surmise that the changes made to the original story were likely caused by the producers wanting to make the most out of Margo’s magnetic character. With Margo alive and well in the finale, and still questioning whether she’ll turn herself in for the murder of Abby, the possibilities for future episodes are truly endless.
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Brad in The Hunting Wives?
Brad is the son of Jill and the boyfriend of Abby in the story. Though Margo sleeps with him repeatedly over the course of the show, he is only 18 years old. This technically makes him an adult, though the ethics behind their relationship are extremely cloudy. Even without factoring the age of consent into the story, the fact that Brad is the son of Margo’s best friend means that she has likely known him since he was a baby, making their relationship highly inappropriate by any metric.
Is The Hunting Wives based on a true story?
Though the many twists and turns present within the narrative of The Hunting Wives may seem like something out of a true crime epic, the narrative is in fact entirely fictional, and not based on any one true story. Still, the series’ examination of upper-crust society and local politics makes for an extremely compelling narrative.
