A Saturday neighborhood lemonade stand turned into “dirty soda” and an evening consumed by Season 1, Episode 1 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the reality series where TikTok-era self-exposure and online embarrassment collide—leaving one viewer drawing
On Saturday, I was pulling weeds next door when I saw garage sale traffic jam the street—and the activity that came with it. I stopped, took off my gloves, ran inside, grabbed cash, and hurried over the way you do when a child is selling something at the curb.
Only it wasn’t lemonade.
Instead of a lemonade stand. my neighbor’s 11-year-old had a setup selling “dirty soda”—pop mixed with whipped cream and a variety of flavored syrups. garnished with a cherry and a gummy. I could feel the old impulse to reward a kid’s hustle take over before I fully understood what I was buying. And when the mom explained that “dirty soda” is a thing on the television show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. ” it all clicked into place: this wasn’t just a snack stand. It was a piece of reality-show fandom delivered in a cup.
The Mormon angle, she said, matters in the show’s lore. “Mormons don’t drink, generally,” she told me, so people have taken to guzzling 44-ounce egg creams on steroids. My neighbor child. fortunately. had Diet Coke on hand—something I appreciated immediately. remembering my own household’s joke about diabetes.
I took the drink back to my office because I wasn’t sure what else to do with it once the mystery was solved. It was “actually quite delicious. ” at least if you ignore the fact that I mostly nibbled the gummy shark swimming in it. Then I did what the modern world trains you to do: I started watching.
I began my research with Season 1, Episode 1 of “Mormon Wives.”
In the first episode, four young Mormon women start making TikTok dance videos. The plot. as the viewer experiences it. is less like a conventional storyline and more like a steady slide into online self-exposure. The show’s premise. in my experience of that opening episode. is built around humiliating yourself—and your friends—for profit. with the dynamic looping through unspecified sexual escapades with each other. or with each other’s husbands. or “both.”.
My wife walked into the moment the way spouses often do: curious, cautious, and trying to keep the night on track. We had agreed to watch “Bridgerton” together, but this was the moment I realized I’d already stepped too far into the abyss.
“‘When does the dirty soda come in?’” she asked as a kind of solidarity move, since she knew I’d already committed.
At the same time. “Bridgerton” hovered in the background of the evening like an escape route—and the contrast between the two shows sharpened something for me. “Bridgerton. ” I wrote in my head. is at least complicated by culture: its cast is described as the most colorblind cast ever. assigning ethnicities arbitrarily to randy 19th century lords and ladies. without any impact on the plot. Even so. that doesn’t stop the show’s bigger effect. which I felt while watching. from “deracinate everyone. ” as if race can be erased without consequence. The music doesn’t help either: a string quartet playing at a 19th century ball can launch into an Ariana Grande tune.
Still, watching “Mormon Wives” made “Bridgerton” feel almost polished by comparison. “Mormon Wives” is what happens when entertainment treats embarrassment as content.
No dirty sodas appear in the first half hour of the first episode. During that stretch, my wife started to edge toward the door. I could relate; the setting alone—young women in enormous white houses. trading reactions and feeling each other’s breast implants—was a lot to endure for someone who just wanted a quiet night.
Then I tried to anchor it in something familiar, something that should have made it easier. “You know, our kids are about the same age as these people,” I said. “I feel so blessed…”
At that point, my wife fled. I heard the motion of her leaving more than I saw it: a quick retreat from the room and from whatever I’d been trying to justify.
Abandoned, I held out for five more minutes. Then I followed.
Later, when I walked into the kitchen where she was making ceviche, I tried to turn the experience into a moral and landed on something harsher than I expected. “I’m glad we watched that,” I told her.
Here, I said, we treat politics like it’s an inexplicable plunge into stupidity. But now, after the show, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that it’s all part of “a greater societal decline.”
It made a kind of grim sense to me—how entertainment and humiliation keep bleeding into real life, how the same impulse that sells embarrassment also shows up in public decision-making. In that moment, the dirty soda didn’t just come from a television show. It felt like it came from a worldview.
dirty soda The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Mormon Wives reality TV TikTok dance videos Diet Coke Bridgerton culture decline US society