This is it. This is your reward. For getting through Christmas, for getting through the crisis-laden sorrowfest that was 2025, the gods of television have vouchsafed us all The Hunting Wives, eight episodes of the most perfect trash to fill our screens since – well, I don’t even know when. Since Rivals? Maybe, but like the book it was based on by the late, great Jilly Cooper, that show was too good to qualify for this coveted title. The Hunting Wives is not. The Hunting Wives is perfect trash. The most perfect trash possibly ever – how’s that?

I’m not sure I can explain quite how much fun it is with only the paltry resource of the written word at my disposal but let me limn first its hysterical outlines and we’ll see how we get on.

So: former Democratic campaign manager Sophie O’Neil (Brittany Snow, last seen in The Beast in Me) and her Harvard graduate, architect-berk husband Graham (Evan Jonigkeit) move with their Tesla and young son Jack from their elitist ivory tower in Cambridge, Massachusetts to the small town of Maple Brook, Texas, just south of Basket of Deplorablesville and slightly to the right of Trump, where Graham is starting a new architect-berk job. Everyone is drunk, armed and on heat. Let’s go!

Sophie is rapidly taken up by Margo (Malin Åkerman), the hot second (at least – I’ve lost track) wife of Graham’s hot new boss, Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney), who – together and separately – have an array of sexual proclivities that may make headlines if and when Jed announces his planned run for governor. Margo is the centre of the coolest lady-clique in town and Sophie is soon rediscovering her long-buried wild side as she starts to enjoy running with this perma-soused Republican pack.

These Mean-Girls-with-cocktails comprise: the sheriff’s wife, Callie (Jaime Ray Newman), who is having an affair with Margo (which is probably OK with the sheriff, as it looks as if he is having it away with one of the young cops in his department); devout Christian Jill (Katie Lowes), wife of the town’s secretly-abusive pastor and mother to late-teenage and permanently priapic Brad (George Ferrier); and two peripheral socialites, Monae (Joyce Glenn) and Taylor (Alexandria DeBerry), who are largely there to make up cocktail numbers.

Brad is going out with Abby (Madison Wolfe), the daughter of an overweight single mother who therefore won’t do at all, much as Brad likes to do her. You’ll never guess who else he likes to do. Oh, you have? Well done! You have the measure of the show already. Isn’t it great?

Every two to three minutes there is a new secret revealed, a bombshell dropped or some sex being had, very rarely in heterosexual pairings, age-appropriate pairings or even pairings at all. I see now why southern hospitality is so legendary. I don’t know where they find the time to get all their target practice, blackmailing, paying off black sheep siblings and framing people for murder in, but Stetsons off to everyone in Maple Wood. They somehow make it work.

If you pay very close attention – but why would you? – you might occasionally spot trace amounts of satire, I presume left over from a very early draft indeed before the writer got a clip round the ear and an admonishment to leave that sort of thing well out of it. The Hunting Wives is adapted from the 2021 book of the same name by May Cobb, which I am minutes away from starting, and thus don’t know what the original intentions of either the author nor the series showrunner, Rebecca Perry Cutter, were. I only know that I couldn’t be happier with the fast, furious, full-blooded results, which exploit the chemistry of all its leads to the full and has enough wit and intelligence to keep it from descending into total melodrama while never shortchanging us on the glorious wildness. I revere Cobb and Cutter jointly and severally, along with whoever has already commissioned a second series and given me a reason to look forward to 2026.