First Look at S2 of The Hunting Wives: Netflix’s Wickedly Queer Texas Fever Dream
Netflix has released a first look at the highly anticipated new season of The Hunting Wives.
If you like your suburban intrigue with designer dresses, loaded shotguns, illicit sex, murder, hypocrisy and a generous helping of bisexual tension, Netflix has a new guilty pleasure for you: The Hunting Wives.
Based on May Cobb’s bestselling novel and developed for television by Rebecca Cutter, the eight-episode series follows Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow), a former political communications professional who moves with her husband and son from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the fictional East Texas town of Maple Brook. There she encounters Margo Banks (Malin Åkerman), the glamorous, wealthy and spectacularly uninhibited wife of an ambitious Republican politician.
Margo doesn’t exactly welcome Sophie to town. She seduces her. And that is when things get complicated. Very complicated.
Within minutes, The Hunting Wives established its recipe: beautiful people behaving terribly, conservative social values colliding with wildly unconventional sex lives, women wielding both social power and actual firearms, and a murder mystery that keeps getting messier. Netflix itself categorizes the show as LGBTQ+, as well as a thriller, mystery, and drama.
Why LGBTQ+ viewers are having so much fun with it
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The Hunting Wives is very queer. It is not, strictly speaking, a lesbian series. In fact, one of the show’s more interesting features is that its characters don’t necessarily define their sexuality using neat LGBTQ+ labels. Margo is married to Jed, but she openly sleeps with women, including Sophie, and her sexuality becomes part of the show’s larger exploration of desire, secrecy and hypocrisy.
Sophie, meanwhile, is not introduced as a woman searching for a queer identity. She arrives in Texas as a married mother whose life has become increasingly constricted. Her attraction to Margo becomes both a sexual awakening and a psychological obsession. That ambiguity is part of the appeal.
The series also gets mileage from the delicious contradiction at its heart: these women live inside an aggressively conservative social environment while pursuing extraordinarily nonconservative private lives. Margo’s husband is a Republican political power broker whose public image depends on traditional family values, while his marriage operates according to a rather different set of rules.
That makes The Hunting Wives catnip for viewers interested in the intersection of queerness, gender, politics and Southern social culture. It is less an earnest LGBTQ+ coming-out drama than a campy queer fever dream about repression.
And yes, there are guns. Lots of guns.
It’s The L Word meets Dallas — with a body count
The fun of The Hunting Wives is that it refuses to choose between sexy soap opera and murder mystery.
Sophie becomes increasingly fascinated by Margo and her circle of wealthy hunting wives, including Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), while the women drink, gossip, hunt, have affairs and attempt to maintain their carefully polished public personas.
Then somebody gets murdered. Actually, eventually, several somebodies do.
The show is deliberately excessive. It is glossy, pulpy and occasionally outrageous, but beneath all the vodka, designer clothing and sexual intrigue is a surprisingly sharp examination of female desire and the rules imposed upon women in conservative communities. Critics have particularly noted its fascination with the double standards surrounding women’s sexuality.
In other words, it is not exactly a documentary about Texas. Thank goodness.
Where Season One was filmed: Welcome to Mooresville
Here is where things get particularly interesting for travelers. Although The Hunting Wives is supposed to take place in East Texas, Season One was filmed primarily in North Carolina, particularly around Mooresville, Charlotte, and Lake Norman.
Downtown Mooresville was transformed into fictional Maple Brook, complete with storefronts and signage designed to look like an East Texas town. Other locations included Charlotte’s Coyote Joe’s, the Dilworth Tasting Room, Chapter 6 cocktail bar, Stone Haven Estate in Concord and locations around Lake Norman.
So if watching the show makes you want to take a Hunting Wives road trip, don’t immediately book a flight to Texas. Book one to Charlotte.
Why Mooresville is worth a trip
Mooresville is considerably more appealing in real life than Maple Brook appears to be. Situated on Lake Norman, it offers a combination of lake recreation, historic downtown, restaurants, breweries, shopping and North Carolina’s extraordinary motorsports culture. The town is sometimes nicknamed “Race City USA” because of its deep connections to NASCAR and racing.
Lake Norman itself is a major attraction, with boating, paddleboarding, kayaking, fishing, jet skis and pontoon rentals. It has more than 32,000 acres of water and roughly 520 miles of shoreline.
And there is an amusing Hunting Wives irony to the whole thing: you can spend your morning exploring the lake, your afternoon wandering downtown and your evening having cocktails — without having to join a suspiciously sexy shooting club.
Charlotte adds the big-city component, with restaurants, nightlife, museums, shopping and a substantial LGBTQ+ scene. So a Hunting Wives-inspired trip can easily become a broader Charlotte/Lake Norman getaway rather than simply a hunt for filming locations.
Explore Mooresville’s official visitor guide.
Season Two: The wives are coming back
Good news for anyone who became emotionally invested in this extraordinarily dysfunctional group: Season Two was filmed and wrapped in March 2026, again using the Charlotte and Gastonia areas of North Carolina to stand in for Maple Brook.
The eight-episode second season continues the story beyond the events of the first season with an original script rather than simply adapting another May Cobb novel. And the setup sounds promisingly unhinged.
Sophie and Margo are on the outs, but old secrets and new enemies eventually force them back together. The central question becomes whether they are the hunters or the hunted.
The returning cast includes Snow, Åkerman, Dermot Mulroney, Jaime Ray Newman, Katie Lowes, and others, while Season Two adds some intriguing new faces, including John Stamos, Dale Dickey, Cam Gigandet, Kim Matula, and Alex FitzAlan.
The cast has also teased that Season Two will not be dialing down the show’s trademark sexuality. Snow has suggested there is “definitely not less” of the naughtiness, while Åkerman has promised “a lot more of everything.”
Season Two is another North Carolina vacation opportunity
The fact that Season Two returned to the Charlotte/Gastonia region is good news for television-location tourists. The production didn’t abandon the Carolina landscape after using it so successfully to create Maple Brook in Season One. That means the wider region is increasingly part of the show’s visual identity, even though viewers are supposed to believe they’re watching East Texas.
For travelers, that’s actually a bonus. You can combine a Hunting Wives filming-location hunt with Charlotte’s food, nightlife and LGBTQ+ culture, then head north toward Lake Norman for the lakeside scenery that helped make the series look convincingly Texan in the first place.
Just don’t expect to find Margo’s house. And if you do encounter a glamorous woman with perfect hair inviting you to a hunting party, perhaps ask a few questions first.
Season Two premieres on Thanksgiving Day (Thursday, November 26, 2026) and will release exclusively as a Netflix-branded series in nearly all countries where Netflix is available.
Here are the Top 10 LGBTQIA-welcoming hotels in Charlotte, North Carolina.
