‘The Hunting Wives’ Uses Red-State Politics to Feel Smarter Than It Is

Note: This story contains mild spoilers about “The Hunting Wives.”

“The Hunting Wives” has joined the elite club of buzzed-about Netflix series, wrapping a soap opera around a murder mystery faster than you can say “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Yet perhaps the show’s most intriguing wrinkle involves incorporating just enough political references to feel like a satire of Southern-fried hypocrisy.

In TV parlance, the underlying premise of the Netflix series — which centers on a liberal Bostonian who finds guns, drugs and lots of musically accompanied sex in a Texas town — owes a debt to “Twin Peaks,” the 1990 series that turned the Laura Palmer mystery into a national guessing game, while containing trace ingredients of “Dallas,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Big Little Lies,” “The Righteous G