SPOILER WARNING: The following story contains plot details from Season 5 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” From its very first moments, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” has been inextricable from the toxic entanglement between #MomTok influencer Taylor Frankie Paul and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. Two years ago, the show began with a violent encounter between the pair as captured on police officers’ body cameras. (The incident resulted in Paul’s arrest and subsequent guilty plea for aggravated assault.) Then, earlier this year, a planned season of “The Bachelorette” starring Paul — a bit of crossover corporate synergy between ABC and “Mormon Wives” streamer Hulu, both owned by Disney — was canceled after more graphic, harrowing footage of the same fight was leaked to TMZ. Paul’s new venture may have been scuttled, but her flagship star vehicle remains intact.
This week, “Mormon Wives” returned for an abridged Season 5, almost entirely filmed before production went on hiatus in March amid Paul’s public relations furor. The new information revealed in the five episodes is minimal. We learn the eventual winner of the final rose on the unaired “Bachelorette” season, making it even less likely the competition will ever see the light of day.
We also learn how irrelevant the victor’s identity is, because Paul slept with Mortensen again the very night she returned from filming. Paul and Mortensen, by her own admission, have “an addiction” to one another and their toxic relationship. Most pairings formed during the “Bachelor” franchise don’t last; Paul’s was doomed before it even began.
But watching Season 5, something else becomes clear: “Mormon Wives” itself has a seemingly unbreakable dependence on the Paul-Mortensen saga, a tragedy that’s at once the show’s driving force and its greatest liability. What has already incurred a quite literal cost to ABC is now exacting a more metaphorical toll on the hit reality show, which is being swallowed whole by its most volatile element. In the season’s closing minutes, cast member Mikayla Matthews expresses her amazement that the friend group known as #MomTok has mutated from a source of “empowerment” into something much darker.
Yet viewers have watched this process unfold in almost real time, making it anything but mysterious. Paul and Mortensen can’t quit each other, “Mormon Wives” can’t quit Paul — and the ensuing tragedy has turned what was once an addictive work of pop sociology into a grim spectacle that’s the opposite of fun. Season 5 makes some token attempts at milking other sources of intrigue, like a half-hearted conflict between “Dancing With the Stars” alumni Jennifer Affleck and Whitney Leavitt or Jessi Draper’s recovery from what she characterizes as excessive plastic surgery.
Paul and Mortensen are nevertheless inescapable — partly because the exes are trapped in an endless cycle, and partly because their dynamic is echoed in so many other pairs within the cast. No one sinks to the same depths as Mortensen, who claims to have sent Paul a sex tape of himself with another woman and, it’s strongly implied, likely weaponized the TMZ footage in retaliation for Paul drawing a boundary. In context, however, the couple comes off less like an exception and more like a tone-setter for a larger study in cautionary romantic tales.
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