The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Cast, Ranked

Let’s talk about season 2!

(Photo: Disney/Fred Hayes)

My pitch for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is always the same: in the first one or two episodes alone, a woman withstands the fallout of exposing the swinging scandal that ended her marriage and a few of her friendships, she finds a boyfriend no one in her life approves of, takes a pregnancy test, has a miscarriage, gets arrested, and still manages to pull focus from her friend confessing that her husband was on Tinder throughout their marriage. This show is pulling the stunts of OG RHONY and OG RHOA. Season two is just as excellent: catty, absurd, sometimes downright tragic. Here are season two’s major players power ranked from worst and most shameless to best and most entertaining.

Chase McWhorter
An entire cast is rarely united in disliking someone — in this case, Chase McWhorter, ex-husband of Miranda McWhorter and one-time actor in a sex dream Taylor Frankie Paul had once — and even more rare that when it happens, it’s completely justified. By the time Chase reared that patchy head of hair at the Halloween party in his Justin Bieber costume, he was the most avoided person in the SLOMW universe. He quickly shows you why: from across the room, he points his finger at Taylor in an aggressive way, he tries to manipulate Dakota into taking his side in a feud Dakota doesn’t even really understand, he abandons his girlfriend to pick a fight with three separate women in the room. When Taylor approaches Chase to ask why he’s pointing at her all hard, he lies about their (mostly non-existent) past together so flagrantly that it’s a low point for Dakota that he couldn’t tell. Even Justin Bieber, who posted about his wife’s Vogue cover with a caption sharing that he once told her that she’d never get a Vogue cover, should be sending a cease and desist to this man. What a noxious personality! Everything everyone said about Chase was true.

Zac Affleck
I wonder about Zac’s med school grades since he has difficulty recognizing classic symptoms of depression and anxiety in his wife Jen. (He also displays a dubious understanding of conception.) He willfully ignores the roots of these issues, which are almost exclusively him. Zac is controlling, selfish, and self-righteous.

When he returns to his wife at the top of season two, he wants to win her trust and rebuild their marriage. To do that, he gossips about Jen with her (not very good, but more on that later) friends, blames her for the viral headlines that their family is not actually related to the Afflecks of Boston, and during the most challenging time of their marriage, does not use protection during sex. (Jen is culpable for some of this too, but at least she is willing to acknowledge she has problems and work to solve them.) Throughout the season Zac starts “hard conversations” only to assign blame to the same person over and over again: it’s Jen’s fault that two husbands performed a striptease for her, it’s Jen’s fault that her friends are bullying her, it’s Jen’s fault that their marriage is going through this period of difficulty.

Demi Engemann