It’s Time for Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to Pull the Plug on Taylor Frankie Paul

12 Sep 2026, 16:11 by Chrissy Stockton · Thought Catalog

Secret Lives of Mormon Wives

Updated 59 seconds ago, September 12, 2026

Season 5 of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is only five episodes long, but it somehow still manages to feel exhausting — entirely because of Taylor Frankie Paul. Every romantic turn brings another breakup, reunion or secret relationship, and the drama keeps escalating until the love story starts to feel like a soap opera with its own soundtrack.

Taylor Frankie Paul joins co-stars Jennifer Affleck, Mayci Neeley, Mikayla Matthews, and Miranda McWhorter at a SiriusXM Radio Andy town hall for “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” in Los Angeles on May 8, 2025. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images.

The season picks up with Taylor returning home from filming her now-shelved season of “The Bachelorette,” and almost immediately drops a twist: she reveals she was secretly in love with another man the whole time, musician Ben Lambert, whom she’d first connected with on a TikTok Live back in Season 4. The two have a whirlwind stretch that includes a secret rendezvous in Manhattan during Whitney Leavitt’s Broadway debut — only for Taylor to end things because she says she isn’t ready for a relationship, while Ben is ready to commit.

Taylor Frankie Paul at Salt Lake City’s Third District Courthouse on April 30, 2026, where a judge granted mutual protective orders between her and Dakota Mortensen following domestic violence investigations. Photo by Bethany Baker / Getty Images.

And then, in a twist that surprises absolutely no one who’s watched this show before, she goes right back to on-again-off-again ex Dakota Mortensen — sleeping with him again the very night she got home from filming, despite the two having what she herself has described as “an addiction” to one another and their toxic relationship.

At Salt Lake City’s Third District Courthouse on April 30, 2026, Joel Kittrell confers with his client Dakota Mortensen ahead of a protective order hearing involving Mortensen and “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” co-star Taylor Frankie Paul. Photo by Bethany Baker / Getty Images.

That whiplash is really the whole season in miniature: new man, breakup, back to the old man, repeat. And it’s compounded by real-world fallout that’s impossible to separate from the storyline — the leaked video of Taylor throwing metal barstools at Mortensen with one of her kids nearby, the domestic violence allegations the two made against each other, and ABC’s decision to pull her already-filmed “Bachelorette” season entirely. A recent Variety column put it bluntly, observing that the show itself now has a seemingly unbreakable dependence on the Paul-Mortensen saga — a tragedy that’s swallowing the series whole and turning what was once addictive reality TV into “a grim spectacle that’s the opposite of fun.”

At the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Taylor Paul makes her arrival for the 98th Oscars on March 15, 2026. Photo by Mike Coppola / Getty Images.

The idea that the show would simply be better without her isn’t a fringe take, either — it’s basically the argument the finale itself makes. By the end of the season, the rest of the cast appears to have had enough, openly calling out how favorably Taylor gets edited compared to everyone else and floating the idea of cutting ties with her for good. And yet the irony is that even as the show flirts with a future without her, its own choices betray how dependent it still is on her chaos: critics have pointed out that Season 5’s relentlessly Taylor-focused edit suggests producers aren’t actually interested in turning the cameras away from their biggest star.

So the fatigue is something everyone — the cast, the critics, and apparently the audience too — seems to sense. And yet nobody, including the show itself, seems willing to actually pull the plug on the thing driving all the ratings.

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