'Secret Lives of Mormon Wives': How Swinging, Scandal, Soda = Big Bank
I talk to EP Lisa Filipelli about the Hulu hit's influencer lives, the way they make money and the show's lucrative 'halo effect' on their #MomTok brands
I cover the creator economy at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled for a limited time for paid subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about the coming creator war between Netflix and YouTube and reported on jobs available in digital content for Hollywood talent. Send me tips, memes and ideas at natalie@theankler.com
Hello, and I hope you had a relaxing holiday weekend. Perhaps you spent it catching up on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which became the most-watched show on Hulu again yesterday, more than a week after its second season premiered.
It’s easy to dismiss The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives — which follows the Salt Lake City-based members of influencer supergroup MomTok as they navigate relationship drama and motherhood — as pure pulp. After all, season one centered on the fallout from MomTok queen bee Taylor Frankie Paul’s revelation that she and some of the other members of the group were swinging. But I devoured season two, and so did many others. Hulu says the show hit 5 million views in the five days after all 10 episodes of season two dropped, a bump in viewership compared with the first season, which was the streamer’s most-watched unscripted series premiere in 2024.
The swinging scandal is certainly a draw, and so is the fascination with Mormon culture — which, according to the show, involves very little alcohol or caffeine but a lot of dirty soda and ketamine therapy (some of the wives are active in the faith, others are more casual or lapsed). But I found myself engrossed in how Secret Lives portrays the life of a social media star. These are women with millions of followers across TikTok and Instagram, who spend their days attending brand events, filming dance videos and hosting celebrity pickleball matches. (Consider it the other side of the same coin from Paul American, the Max series centered on Jake and Logan Paul — no relation to Taylor — that I explored in a recent column.)
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The members of MomTok were making all the requisite influencer moves before Secret Lives, but the show has completely changed the game for all of them. The brand deals are bigger, the opportunities higher-profile and the jealousy off the charts. In season two, Mayci Neeley, 30, announces she’s landed a book deal, and Paul, 31, presents at the CMA Awards. And unlike other shows, where drama is manufactured for the cameras, much of the conflict on Secret Lives involves off-camera bickering (which is eventually moved on camera) about who’s getting paid the most to appear on the show and who lands the most lucrative sponsored posts.
I had a lot of questions about how the show is made, and how the spotlight has impacted the careers of its influencer stars, so I called up Lisa Filipelli, one of the executive producers of Secret Lives. Filipelli has been a manager to social media stars like Tyler Oakley and Miss Benny for more than a decade, and she currently co-leads Select Management Group — a management firm majority owned by Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens’ Propagate Content — as a partner.
It was an enterprising manager at Select, Danielle Pistotnik, who first signed Paul, Neeley and other stars of the show about two years before Paul lit up pandemic-era TikTok with the news that she and some of the other members of MomTok had been “soft swinging” with each other’s husbands. “Danielle was adamant that there was a bigger story,” Filipelli tells me. “She was like, ‘Taylor is a star. Mayci is a star.’ They all had really fascinating lives that they were living outside of the social media realm.”
As Paul’s star rose in 2022 — and she dealt with the fallout from the scandal, including a divorce and friend breakups — Select’s phone started to ring with pitches from producers who wanted to turn MomTok into a TV show. That’s when Filipelli stepped in and brought on Russell Jay-Staglik at Jeff Jenkins Productions, who had a relationship with Hulu. The deal was done in a matter of days, an unheard of feat in Hollywood, and they quickly shot a pilot episode.
Then, in early 2023, Paul was arrested for domestic violence and the entire project was thrown into limbo. Eventually, they were able to put the show into production. The eight-episode first season debuted in September 2024 and it was quickly renewed for another 20 episodes, the back half of which are currently being filmed.
Today, I’ve got the most revealing highlights (lightly edited) from my call with executive producer Lisa Filipelli. Read on to find out:
How off-camera battles and brand deal beefs hijacked the storyline — and made it juicier
The rogue production choice that blew up the influencer reality playbook
What those now-iconic “fourth wall” breaks really expose about the creator economy’s smoke and mirrors
Brand deal envy, off-camera tension and why influencer life is tougher than it looks
The scandal-proof glow-up: how reality fame is turbocharging the wives’ business empires
With motherhood is kept mostly off-camera, and what the producers say to “Where are the kids?”
The sneaky ways these wives are flipping the script on conservative stereotypes
What Hulu’s cooking up next — and how long the Secret Lives circus can keep swinging