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If The Hunting Wives had you addicted since the first season, you are most likely a fan of gripping and emotionally-charged content. The series is inspired by May Cobb's novel of the same name, and it does not just thrills with the craft of twists. It also bets double or nothing on psychological cat-and-mouse games between women, their decisions, and the secrets they attempt to keep buried.
Against the backdrop of an East Texas suburbia, the show unveils friendship, betrayal, power, and desire, rolling out each episode incisively. It is a show that thrives on voyeurism, peer pressure, and chaos of rash choices.
Thrillers aren't always equally effective. That’s why we have rounded up five drama thrillers that echo the key themes and storytelling style of The Hunting Wives, making them strong candidates for your next watchlist. These shows don’t just offer surface-level tension, they build tension through personal stakes, fractured trust, and the slow realization that nobody is what they seem.
Have a look at these 5 drama thrillers after The Hunting Wives and you wouldn't regret it
1. Big Little Lies
Fans of The Hunting Wives will immediately recognize a similar emotional terrain in Big Little Lies. The show is set in Monterey, California, and the story is about five women whose lives disintegrate despite their privilege and guise of perfection. Each woman is caught up in deceptions pertaining to issues ranging from spousal violence to murder, all of which builds toward a slow-burn narrative and a simmering conclusion.
Like The Hunting Wives, the series is built on female bonding and rivalry, as it explores how privilege can mask, or unmask, harmful truths. The narrative is non-linear, and truths are bared bit by bit in layers, leaving the audience in suspense. Both shows also have a thematic similarity in the manner they portray how women manage social expectation, personal loss, and the extent to which they fight for themselves or one another.
Big Little Lies isn't about crime per se. It is the emotional harm, moral complexity and the domestic tension we have also seen in The Hunting Wives.
2. Tell Me Your Secrets
Dark, foreboding, and psychologically charged, Tell Me Your Secrets tells the dark backstories of three people whose paths intersect amidst savage violence. The series doesn't narrate its story on a linear basis, instead, it divides the narrative between a woman who was involved with a serial killer, a bereaved mother seeking closure, and a troubled man attempting to restore his life. The suspense is not created through action scenes but through the withholding of emotions and a slow pile-up of situations that lead to doom.
Similar to The Hunting Wives, the show delves into character psychology and the notion that redemption will often go hand in hand with guilt amidst uncomfortable silence. Both series compel the audience to challenge the innocence of characters, and search beyond the surface. Tell Me Your Secrets gives no tidy solutions, just like The Hunting Wives reaches a morally dubious, open-ended conclusion.
3. Dead to Me
Dead to Me seems light on the surface with its humorous undertones, but don't let that fool you. This show goes deep into mourning, lying, and strained friendships among women. It is ultimately a tale of two women building an unlikely bond only for lies to ruin everything they thought they had. The guilt, emotional manipulation, and inadvertent violence in the series are all similar to what the viewers witness on The Hunting Wives.
Both series highlight situations where women are perps as well as victims in life. The shows also talk about friendship and love. Dead to Me shifts tone continually, from emotionally-charged drama to black humor. This mirrors the seesaw of The Hunting Wives, wherein getting close and betraying someone is as sharp as a razor's cut.
4. Sharp Objects
If you were attracted to The Hunting Wives' slow-burn, atmospheric impact of discomfort, then you might find Sharp Objects equally compelling. Based on Gillian Flynn's debut novel, the series follows a journalist back to her hometown for an assignment about the murders of two teenage girls. The more she looks into the case, the more repressed memories and inherited trauma begin to surface. The visual and narrative tone is muted and somber, meant to unsettle the viewer.
As with The Hunting Wives, the series is not about action-oriented mayhem. Rather, psychological breakdown, hidden trauma, and toxicity in friendship among women sustain the narrative. The narratives of both shows highlight identity, repression, and smalltown secrets. With a detective-victim protagonist, Sharp Objects matches with The Hunting Wives in terms of tone and pace.
5. The Undoing
The Undoing is about a temporary ruin of an ideal life. Following a horrific murder that shocks Manhattan's elite, a woman is confronted with the prospect of her husband hiding something far more sinister than she could have imagined. It is a tale that looks at love and trust, and how easily people believe things.
Although the environment is far removed from that of The Hunting Wives, the current of suspicion and alienation is steadily present. Both shows construct their story on an uncovered truth, with the female lead having to deal not only with members of her group, but also her own decisions and misplaced beliefs, as they are gradually uncovered. The uncovering of truths, the tense courtroom drama, and the adverse psychological impact on proganosists echo similar storytelling tools in The Hunting Wives.
The Hunting Wives started as a mystery but turned rapidly into a study of power, secrecy, and control among female friends. It is not a traditional murder mystery that captures the audience, but the plot's elements of manipulation and mistrust linger on.
All of the above five shows aim at catering similar underlying ideas in different manners, and try to explain why lines defining friendship and rivarly continuously get blurred.
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If The Hunting Wives left you guessing the motives of its characters, and aching for more suspense driven by characters, these series provide similar vibes. Coastal drama, suburban scandal, or inner-city conflict, whatever the genre, they all operate out of the same narrative vocabulary. Most importantly, they remind us that the true danger is usually hidden behind the mask of normalcy.
Also read: If The Hunting Wives Season 2 happens it should definitely address these 5 unresolved plot points
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