Netflix’s The Hunting Wives will be taking inspiration from a book — but how close is it sticking to the source material?
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly at the Motion Picture & Television Fund NextGen Annual Summer Party, star Katie Lowes previewed the “very sexy” summer show.
“There are a lot of similarities to the book, and then not,” she teased. “But May Cobb — the writer of the book — was on set with us all the time.”
Lowes, 42, recalled getting Cobb’s “blessing every which way,” adding, “She’s so psyched about it. If you read the book, you know it is the perfect greeting ground for just amazing water cooler drama. It’s great.”
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The Hunting Wives, which premieres on July 21, follows a woman who “moves to a deep East Texas town with her family and becomes drawn” to a prominent socialite. After joining a clique of wealthy housewives, the newcomer “falls into a rabbit hole of obsession, seduction and murder.”
In addition to Lowes, who is playing Jill, The Hunting Wives stars Malin Akerman, Brittany Snow, Dermot Mulroney, Evan Jonigkeit, Chrissy Metz, Jaime Ray Newman and George Ferrier.
Lowes isn’t the only cast member to hype the show up — as Snow, 39, previously promised plenty of twists and turns.
“I’m in North Carolina right now [filming],” Snow told MovieWeb in April 2024. “I think that people are going to be really surprised at how silky and salacious and sexy this show is.”
She continued: “It’s definitely unlike anything I’ve done before, and it’s stretching me in a way that is really cool because my character has the biggest arc in terms of who we think she is and who she turns out to be. There’s a lot of scenes in this show. It has such a great cast.”
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Cobb, 52, meanwhile, broke down her process for writing the book.
“I wrote the first half in about four months. I had the idea for about a year, so I had been thinking about it. And I had the overview, the basic plot points, but I still didn’t know who the murderer was till I got to the halfway point,” she recalled to Fiction Writers Review in 2021. “There’s a lot that I had to figure out, but it was so much fun.”
Cobb called The Hunting Wives a “good escape” for her. “I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, but then I’ve gotten a lot of pearl-clutching reviews where people say they can’t stand the women. Some of it’s kind of crazy,” she noted. “Then there are a lot of negative reviews saying that they don’t agree with the women’s choices, and I’m like, ‘Is that why you read novels — to agree with the characters?’ The question of likable female characters is endlessly fascinating to me.”
The Hunting Wives premieres July 21, 2025 on Netflix.
