Rebecca Perry Cutter's crime dramas make room for women whose desires cause trouble. We like her humour and her willingness to take those desires seriously, though the murder plotting can be less convincing than the affairs.
Fi1m perspective
In The Hunting Wives (2025), Brittany Snow and Malin Akerman make an attraction believable amid increasingly extravagant complications. Rebecca Perry Cutter understands why we might keep watching people who are making a mess of their lives. We cared about the affair because the performers gave it enough feeling to survive the surrounding excess. Her writing allows humour and desire to coexist without making every feeling into a joke. This is entertaining soap, though the murder mystery is considerably less convincing.
Before creating her own series, Cutter wrote and directed Besties (2012). Her television work included writing and story-editing on The Mentalist from 2012 to 2014, then writing and producing on Gotham from 2014 to 2016. We find The Mentalist agreeable chiefly for Simon Baker's mischievous intelligence. Its cases seldom escape the familiar formula, but we would not assign the deductions that come too easily to any one writer. Her own series offer a clearer sense of what she wants to put on screen.
Hightown (2020), the first series she created, made a queer woman's addiction and murder investigation central to the story. Set in Provincetown and Cape Cod, it gave Cutter room for flawed female characters and a community with its own habits and pressures. Cutter's interest is in how an investigation intersects with a life already in difficulty, which gives the crime a reason to matter beyond the solution.
For The Hunting Wives, she adapts May Cobb's novel with a good understanding of what keeps a soap moving. Across the first series' eight episodes, Cutter establishes an attraction, complicates it and keeps enough unresolved to make the next episode tempting. The pace disguises some thin characterisation, but it cannot make the murder plotting persuasive when the writing begins to strain. We would welcome more time with these women before the next revelation arrives, since the humour suggests Cutter can hold our attention without one. Start here if sexual melodrama is what the evening needs, and do not expect the investigation to be the main pleasure.
Biography
Rebecca Perry Cutter is an American writer, producer and director. She studied at Wesleyan University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major in English and women’s studies, and later received an M.F.A. in Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Cutter began her television career as a writer and story editor on The Mentalist (2012–2014), writing five episodes. She subsequently wrote for Gotham (2014–2016), where she also served as producer, and created, wrote, produced and directed episodes of the Starz series Hightown (2020–2024). Her other credits include the feature Besties (2012), which she wrote and directed, the Netflix series The Hunting Wives (2025), which she created and showran, and an episode of Boston Blue (2025). In 2022 she received the Outstanding Writer Drama Series award from the Women’s Image Network for the Hightown episode “Great White”.
