The Juiciest, Most Devourable New Show on Television Is on a Network You’d Never Expect

Television An Absolute Banger of a New TV Show Is About, Well, Banging TLC’s Double Lives of Suburban Wives expertly merges so many of our cultural behemoths. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? Aug 09, 202610:01 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Images via TLC. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Mothers, more than any other group of people, are confronted with the loudest and ugliest reactions to their sexuality. Fathers are seemingly entitled to maintain their sexual lives after they have kids, in both private and public, with little to no dishonor or consideration of how it might impact their family. But mothers who have sex are criticized or shamed, and if they dare make their show of sexuality a public one—like Kim Kardashian does so often, on her Instagram or through her Skims campaigns, or the agitated public discourse when a single mother like Olivia Wilde starts dating the much younger Harry Styles—the public’s response is typically one of both disgust and titillation. TLC’s latest offering, Double Lives of Suburban Wives, which premiered on Sunday, plays with this dichotomy in the most watchable way possible. The eight-episode first season follows six women in St. Louis while they raise their children, tend to their husbands, go to church, and, of course, manage wildly successful and publicly available adult content accounts. Among them are a disgraced former teacher, another former educator trying to claw her way out from under the burden of student loans, and several wives who started doing sex work after their husbands lost their jobs. (Thankfully, there’s a brunette and a redhead, so you can at least try to tell the women apart more easily here than on, say, Love Island.) The show is an expert merging of so many cultural behemoths already rooted in our consciousness: the religious thread of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the relational conflict of any Real Housewives franchise featuring mothers, the sex-soaked scandals of female teachers with identifiable OnlyFans accounts. “Being a Christian and being in the adult content world is just as it sounds: it’s very clashing,” says ostensible leader of the pack Tammy (who goes by Erika Swingz online). “Sometimes I wrestle with God and think about how my job and my lifestyle could cost me a normal life.” The adult content these women are making is consensual and not particularly controversial, even when two of them get a little naked in a private dressing room together at a cowgirl-themed store for a quick video. Based on what we see in the show, their content is a lot of very fit blondes (and one brunette and one redhead, don’t forget) coquettishly slipping off a tank top to show off a perfectly round boob. Their husbands are involved in the business, either helping them make solo videos, making videos with their wives for public consumption, or helping vacuum-seal underwear to be shipped off to adoring subscribers. This is decidedly digital sex work: no face-to-face experiences, no infidelity, and no swinging. (Not yet. A viewer can only hope!) Even with their husbands on board, most of the cast is still contending with the very real shame they’re facing in their communities for their work of choice. While a few of them have already been outed as adult models, some have been trying to hide in plain sight by switching up their wigs and hoping that everyone at church won’t figure it out. As the show premieres, they’ll have to take the terrifying step of telling their wider circles—including one cast member who will eventually have to tell her pastor father—how their family is earning an income. And if you’re wondering why they’ve opted to be on a TLC show if they’re so afraid of being found out, well, most of them have already been outed in real life. At this point, they either double down as content creators and hope to juice their subscriber numbers, or hope the next school board that’s hiring doesn’t Google their names. What Double Lives does so effectively is tease out the subversions and complications of being a Christian mother doing sex work, but without shaming them for the choice. It’s clear these women have mostly made the decision to sell photos and videos (and underwear—resourceful!) out of a kind of financial duress. Some of their husbands had lost their jobs, and as public school teachers, their income was never enough to keep their families afloat. For these women, a second job was necessary. If the job market has hollowed out and men are struggling more than most to find and keep their jobs, it’s inevitably up to their wives to make sure that their families can pay their rent and keep food on the table. What shame is there in taking care of your family? What shame is there in enjoying sex enough that you can make a profit off of it? Whether their husbands are particularly thrilled with their wives’ new careers remains somewhat dubious after the first episode. While Brianna and Phillip make videos together since she lost her teaching job (her pivot to adult content has, they tell us, made them upward of seven figures in mere months), all the husbands seem like deer caught in headlights when they talk about how economic worries nudged their wives not just toward becoming working mothers, but mothers who do this particular kind of work. “I felt kind of jealous at first, like, She posted that online? That’s a video I’ve always wanted her to send to me,” says Phillip. “It was all good. It was hot.” Double Lives is a natural progression of the tradwife left with a husband who can’t actually provide the way they were all promised. These women come from especially traditionalist mindsets, one where the husband is the head of the household as God has always commanded it. They were promised a particular life from their church and from a culture that told them that men go to work and women stay home with the kids. Those promises fell flat, and it’s so often the women who pick up the mantle. The show may sometimes play with the idea that performing sex work is a rebellion for these religious women. But there’s a more profound contradiction: By becoming the financial leaders of their family, the real revolution isn’t in the kind of work they’re choosing, but that they’re opting for work in the first place. Like so many tradwives, these are playing in the sandbox of traditional family values while turning them over, becoming the breadwinners through the oldest and paradoxically the least expected type of employ. There’s only one episode of Double Lives available to critics, but the show is so devourable, it would merit a weekend binge-watch. It’s enjoyable partly because it never descends into scolding these women for their work, or treating them like fools, or mocking their sexuality. They are, indeed, MILFs, and good for them! There’s still internal pressure in their marriages and friendships, but it’s not really about their decision to be on OnlyFans. Because they’re all making similar content, there’s no grandstanding about who is most moral or more godly—an argument that often came up on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The cast of Double Lives is primed to fight like they’re on Real Housewives, but at least it’s a fair fight about parties and friendship and not morality and decency. At the end of the first episode, three of the women are being filmed by the crew—doing nothing more than walking aimlessly on treadmills—when a producer breaks the fourth wall and tells them they all need to leave. The owner of the gym (where they were, presumably, already granted a filming permit) had Googled one of the women. It’s jaw-dropping, but above all, insulting. Performing legal sex work on your own time in your own home hardly merits getting booted from some no-name gym in St. Louis. The scene is a testament to how real this shame can be. But it’s still just so silly. Getting all bent out of shape about women—mothers and wives!—being sexual creatures? I mean, how else do you think you got here? Get the best of culture Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more. Motherhood Pornography Sex TV Reality TV