Now on Netflix: In a coastal town where power, parenting, and past mistakes collide, a close-knit group of women begins to unravel after a tragedy at a school fundraiser.
Secrets fester. Alliances crack.
And just like that, what seemed like a perfect life starts to rot from the inside.
Rotten Tomatoes is already impressed. You’ll binge it. Then you’ll need someone to talk to.

Netflix finally has a replacement for HBO’s Big Little Lies with The Hunting Wives. Both series are based on bestselling novels and follow women with dark secrets.

The Hunting Wives premiered on Netflix on Jul. 21. Based on May Cobb’s series of the same name, the new series follows a woman as she moves with her family from Boston to Texas and gets close to a group of women with unexpected hobbies. Following its release, The Hunting Wives debuted with an encouraging 70% approval score from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

The new drama series’ score might not be the best, but it comes from only 10 reviews. Out of all of them, seven are positive, and most are based on three hours of footage out of the eight episodes. Since the series debuted on Netflix recently, there is no audience score available.

However, the early reaction from the critics is positive. The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han highlights, “No one is likely to mistake The Hunting Wives for the deepest show of the summer… In terms of pure over-the-top fun, I suspect it’ll be hard to beat Margo and Sophie and friends screwing and backstabbing their way through Maple Brook.” The review points out, “The Hunting Wives consistently prioritizes steamy scenes over sensible plotting or nuanced characters, juicy twists over deep emotions or big ideas. It might all be incredibly frustrating, if it were not also so wildly entertaining.”

Ready Steady Cut’s Jonathon Wilson wrote that the series is “ridiculous in many ways, including its plotting, characterisation, and political viewpoint, which would be more of a problem if it weren’t so precisely engineered to be impossible to stop watching.” The review continues, “It has a contagious lack of interest in being anything other than outrageous all of the time, and it doesn’t patronizingly linger on meatier issues or sociopolitical points to teach the audience a lesson.”

The Daily Beast’s Nick Shager argued that The Hunting Wives is “an eminently watchable beach read-y affair that makes up for its lack of originality with bold, brash red-state attitude,” drawing some similarities to Big Little Lies with a red-state take.

Among the negative reviews, Variety’s Alison Herman highlights the “Twist after twist keeps the story constantly in motion, at the expense of both texture and basic coherence, until the season ends on an oddly open note — less hanging over a cliff than trailing off into the ether.” RogerEbert.com’s Nandini Balial points out “Mulroney and Akerman are having a good time, with mostly solid accent work, making the best of the wobbly writing,” but it’s not enough, arguing that “The writing, photography, and direction are as stale as the four-day-old brioche on my kitchen counter.”

Who Stars in The Hunting Wives?

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Gotham‘s Rebecca Cutter created the show based on the book by May Cobb. The Hunting Wives is technically a mystery thriller, as it features secrets and a crime. However, it’s all about the drama. The series reflects HBO’s Big Little Lies, which was based on Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern, and Shailene Woodley.

The Hunting Wives stars Malin Åkerman (Dollface) as Margo, Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect) as Sophie, Dermot Mulroney (Chicago Fire) as Jed, Chrissy Metz (This Is Us) as Starr, Jaime Ray Newman (Dopesick) as Callie, Katie Lowes (Scandal) as Jill, and Evan Jonigkeit (Sweetbitter) as Graham.

The show’s official description reads, “The Hunting Wives follows a woman as she and her family move from Boston to Texas. There, she grows close to a socialite — maybe too close — and becomes consumed by obsession, seduction, and murder.”

The Hunting Wives is streaming on Netflix.a