Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 20, 2025
This is going to sound strange, but if season three of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives were a novel, it would be a bestseller — one of those Reese Witherspoon picks book clubs devour. I’m not kidding. The arc is exactly the sort of middle-to-highbrow domestic drama I love to read.
Distilled into a logline, the central story reads like this: When a Mormon housewife’s secret affair comes to light, the revelation sends shockwaves through her close-knit circle, threatening to unravel the marriages and identities of everyone in it.
Or: A Mormon housewife’s affair shatters the fragile harmony of her community, forcing the women around her to confront their own marriages, faith, and buried desires.
Tell me you wouldn’t read that book.
That’s the gist of the third season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which initially looked like it would be a letdown because, when filming began, several of the housewives had basically quit MomTok, the group at the center of the show. Whitney had left because she didn’t feel wanted and reportedly wanted a scripted-series guarantee; Jen Affleck was still on her mental-health break; Taylor (the nominal lead) was on her own rehabilitative retreat; and Demi had been ostracized and pushed out.
But having the four most popular members take a backseat — at least early on — gave the show room to focus on its peripheral players, which led to a scandal that not only drew everyone back into the fold but became the season’s main narrative engine.
Here’s what happened: At the end of last season, rumors swirled that Demi had been sexually involved with a guy named Marciano from Vanderpump Villa during a trip to Italy. When one of the Wives, Layla, confronted Marciano, he revealed that he’d actually slept with Jessi — a revelation completely out of left field because Jessi and Marciano were never even rumored to be involved.
When confronted, Jessi didn’t deny having an “emotional affair” with Marciano but insisted they never had sex. The first few episodes revolve around uncovering the truth, eventually leading to Marciano and Jessi taking a lie-detector test that confirmed they had not had sex.
Even so, the “affair” sent shockwaves through the group. And while much of that played out between Jessi and her husband, Jordan (who ultimately agreed to a temporary separation), you could feel how it rippled through the other marriages. While the Wives processed everything by talking about it constantly, the men of DadTok were having their own quiet reckoning — conversations about the pressures of the show, about fidelity, and about the cracks in their own relationships.
Layered on top of that is Mormonism itself: thanks to the show, most of the Wives are now the family breadwinners. The husbands say they’re “OK with that,” but every time those words come out of their mouths, you can practically see them recoil. These are men raised within a strict patriarchy, watching their wives thrive publicly and financially. And Jordan is doubly emasculated by the affair — triply so when he watches the season and discovers that Jessi told Jen Affleck he had a “small weiner.”
No kidding: this is Richard Russo material. Updike wishes.
And while Jessi is figuring out whether to save her marriage, the season adds yet another twist: Did Demi coach Marciano into lying about having sex with Jessi to cover up her own indiscretions? Emily Henry, you’ve been outmaneuvered by a reality show.
Much of the back half of the season hinges on the fracture between the Demi supporters (basically just Whitney) and the Jessi supporters (everyone else). Then Demi introduces a #MeToo-era narrative, reframing her relationship with Marciano as sexual assault. Curtis Sittenfeld, please SIT DOWN. The complexity of that alone gives the season enormous moral heft. The Wives are skeptical because Demi continued to spend time with Marciano, which they see as proof she’s lying — but they’re also aware of how easily skepticism slides into victim blaming. Trauma doesn’t always look tidy. Sometimes women maintain the relationship. Sometimes they perform normalcy to survive.
Whether Demi’s account is true almost doesn’t matter. The presence of the storyline forces the group to examine how women are supposed to respond after an assault, how communities police belief, and whether Demi might be willing to ruin a man’s life to salvage her marriage. All of this comes to a head during a press tour, where the Wives are pushed into confronting each other — and themselves — in public.
Franzen has never written a novel this morally tangled and this entertaining. We’re in Jennifer Weiner/Tom Perrotta territory. And that’s before you even get to the two major subplots: Rachel’s on-again, off-again romance with her ex, Dakota, and Mikayla’s intimacy struggles rooted in childhood sexual abuse — both storylines an Alice Munro or a Richard Yates could build a whole book around, only with more TikTok dances and 7/11 Big Gulps.
Sure, the show could use an editor, and the dialogue isn’t exactly Celeste Ng, but the themes? The moral questions? The religious subtext? It’s practically National Book Award material. I’m dead serious. I read a lot of novels that mine the same themes, and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives — on a literary level — is as good as any of them. Forget the Emmys. Put Secret Lives of Mormon Wives up for Best Goodreads of the Year.
