*Spoilers for Season Five of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives ahead, so if you haven’t watched and plan to, don’t read yet!*
After the devastation that came for the women of MomTok when ABC pulled Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette, season five was heavily anticipated across the ABC and Hulu fan bases. This 5-episode season, cut short due to production pause regarding Paul and ex-Dakota Mortenson, gives insight into the weeks after Paul returned from filming and how things fell apart.
To say that Taylor Frankie Paul has become the villain of this season would be an understatement. Not only have fans turned against her this season, but the other women on the show have turned their backs on her as well. Before the season dropped, most of the women on the show had become victims of Paul’s parasocial fanbase. Her fans were addressed multiple times in season five, with Jessi Draper stating she is afraid of Paul’s fans more than Paul herself. It has become normalized for her to bring personal feuds to life on the internet to spite the women.
The central issue addressed this season was Paul’s addiction to self-sabotage by way of the men in her life. This season picks up with her back from filming and already having spent another night with Mortenson while actively engaged to Doug, whom she met on The Bachelorette. Then, the women take a trip to New York City to support Whitney Leavitt on her opening night of Chicago, and she hosts her fling Ben in the penthouse she is staying in.
When Draper, Mayci Neeley, and Mikayla Matthews try to address this issue with her, Paul gets immediately defensive and admits she knows that what she is doing is wrong, but she won’t stop. Something I noticed more than ever this season was how all the women, most of all Taylor Frankie Paul, weaponize “therapy-talk” to make their point sound stronger and more personal compared to others. This also gives way to disagreements being taken much more personally and in return, producing these explosive fights that reality television feeds off. For example, Paul throws multiple low blows to her friends in arguments this season: comparing Neely and Matthew’s sexual abuse to each other in relation of how “they compared their marriages to Paul’s relationship.
This honestly draws a parallel to the biggest issue MomTok was first trying to tackle: the patriarchy. Young women in Utah are getting married and not going to college, submitting to the Mormon stereotype. Most of the women have followed this path (with the exception being BYU graduate Neely) and as a result, have no idea what they are implying with the therapy-talk. This is even more evident when we hear the women (AND Dadtok) mispronounce words or use them the wrong way. At the end of the day, the women are victims and perpetrators of what they are trying to fight, which is why their show works so well. There will never be an end to the drama because it is real arguments stemming from the patriarchal environment they live in.