Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 22, 2026
Do you have a super messy, toxic friend it’s good to catch up with every few months, just so you have someone to talk to other people about? That’s Taylor Frankie Paul: Great for conversation. Terrible for humanity.
That’s the thing about Secret Lives of Mormon Wives through the better part of five seasons: The entire reality series runs through her, but when the drama is not about her, the show suffers. The good news for fans of messy drama is that she brings a lot of it. But that’s also the bad news: She sucks up all the oxygen in the room, and her particular drama is increasingly messy verging on sad.
Actually, there’s no verging about it anymore. It’s a train wreck, but not the kind suitable for rubberneckers. It’s just a tragedy now that Hulu is propping up for streaming engagement.
The central storyline through four seasons has been the relationship between Taylor Frankie Paul and her baby daddy, Dakota Mortensen. In fact, the series’ first season kicked off with Taylor Frankie Paul — recently divorced owing to a swinging scandal in the Mormon community — involved in a domestic dispute with Dakota that involved the cops and Taylor Frankie Paul’s arrest.
It was the video from that 2023 altercation that surfaced early this year and eventually derailed Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette. But it didn’t stop season 5 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives because time + tragedy = more streaming hours. The five episodes of this fifth season all led up to the production pause when a friend of Dakota’s released video of that 2023 incident to TMZ. The video showed a visibly upset Taylor Frankie Paul throwing a barstool at Dakota while her child was in the room.
The narrative of the fifth season is largely focused on the toxic relationship between Dakota and Taylor — the two literally slept together the night Taylor returned from The Bachelorette, despite being engaged on the show to a guy named Doug, who doesn’t appear in the season, but who all the other cast members describe as a Dakota type: kind of a bad guy. Meanwhile, Taylor’s also juggling a relationship with Ben, who appears to be not entirely horrible, which is probably why Taylor broke up with him in the third or fourth episode while on a trip to NYC to watch Whitney Leavitt’s debut on Broadway in Chicago.
But mostly, the season is still about Taylor and Dakota, and the series seems to be building toward a black-and-white narrative: Is Taylor the villain for throwing a barstool at Dakota? Or is Dakota the villain for orchestrating the release of the video?
If you ask me, they’re both villains, and whether Dakota engineered the release to sabotage Taylor Frankie Paul’s life and her season of The Bachelorette is irrelevant: She threw a barstool at the father of her child in front of the child. That should be the story. The entire story. And honestly, the kid should be taken away from both Taylor and Dakota. They’re not fit parents. They’re not fit people. They have this deranged addiction to each other. They absolutely know they’re bad for each other—they talk about it constantly—and yet, they cannot resist each other. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.
But it’s all fodder for this reality series. Hulu treats them as characters instead of people. And everyone else on this show is a supporting character in the life of Taylor Frankie Paul. They all know it, too. They don’t get camera time unless they’re talking about Taylor and Dakota or Taylor and Ben or Taylor and Doug. There’s some minor drama about Jen Affleck trying (and failing) to make amends with Whitney Leavitt, who exited at the end of the season because she has better things to do now than support the Taylor Frankie Paul show (and she’s barely in this season, except as it relates to Chicago). There’s also some minor drama between Jen and her husband, Zac, who keeps insisting that he’ll divorce her if she starts to act — not that he has anything to worry about, since Jen can’t land a gig outside of Secret Lives, having fizzled as a personality on Dancing with the Stars. And they try to make something out of Jessi’s affair with Marciano, but that’s old news, and without Demi on the show any longer, there’s no real drama there either.
Ultimately, there’s not much reason to watch the fifth season. I watched because I was morbidly curious as to how they’d handle the fallout. They handled it by giving Taylor Frankie Paul an out—Dakota orchestrated the release—so that she could eventually return in season six, which had been confirmed until this week, when she dropped out of the Hulu series, citing bullying from her castmates, though it’s hard not to wonder if the drug tests she failed had anything to do with it (she had her ability to spend time with her kids cut to 8 hours a week). Her departure (if it sticks) is clearly better for her own mental health and probably that of humanity’s, but I suspect it will also lead to the quick demise of the series beyond a sixth season, which will probably largely be about the rest of the remaining castmembers “processing” the exit of Taylor Frankie Paul.
