2025’s Top Trending TV Show on Google

Of all the TV show search queries in 2025, Netflix’s steamy summer drama The Hunting Wives was the highest trending. Based on the novel by May Cobb, The Hunting Wives cast is led by Brittany Snow, who plays Sophie O’Neill, a troubled woman who moves from Boston to East Texas with her family because of her husband’s job.

Initially a fish out of water, Sophie is quickly befriended by the charming, hedonistic Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), who welcomes Sophie into her clique of rich, right-wing “hunting wives.” However, things go south when a local cheerleader is murdered, and Sophie finds herself the prime suspect.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse game between Sophie and Margo that’s as dangerous as it is erotic. Twisty, shocking, and vulgar right up until The Hunting Wives‘ explosive season 1 finale, this Netflix series was the watercooler show of the summer, and that’s reflected in Google Trends.

The Hunting Wives Was The Biggest TV Trend Of 2025

Google recently published their Year in Search page for 2025, which included search trends in every category from news to athletes to mocktails to TV. To be clear, these are not the “most searched” terms but “trending searches.” As Google explains, “we identify the search terms that saw the highest increase in traffic between January 1, 2025 and November 25, 2025, compared to the same period last year.“

In Google’s top 5 TV “trending searches,” The Hunting Wives was number 1, followed by The White Lotus, The Pitt, The Summer I Turned Pretty, and Squid Game.

This makes sense, as Netflix’s The Hunting Wives and HBO Max’s The Pitt were two of the buzziest new shows released in 2025. Meanwhile, Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and Netflix’s Squid Game had highly anticipated series finales this year.

The White Lotus was the only show in the top 5 not to premiere or end in 2025, with its third season premiering in February. This is hardly a surprise, though, as the dark HBO comedy series encourages high social media engagement with its viewers.

Every episode drops more clues (or red herrings) as to who will die in the finale, and The White Lotus characters‘ behavior is almost as outrageous as what’s shown on The Hunting Wives. It’s unknown when the next seasons of The Hunting Wives or The White Lotus will come out, but if they release the same year, it’ll make for quite the grudge match on Google Trends.

Why The Hunting Wives Was So Successful

When it comes to thriller TV shows, The Hunting Wives is an absolute masterpiece. It leans into popular tropes like an upper-class domestic setting, affairs and other sordid secrets, and an unreliable, unhinged protagonist. This formula is catnip to fans of the thriller genre.

However, that alone is not enough to make a show stand out. What makes The Hunting Wives so successful is how it takes these beloved tropes and dials them up to an 11. It’s appropriate that the show is set in Texas because everything is bigger in The Hunting Wives — the twists, the betrayals, everything.

Though The Hunting Wives‘ main mystery is who killed Abby Jackson (Madison Wolfe), a local high school cheerleader, Abby is far from the only body to drop. Just about every character has an ax to grind, the will to kill, and of course, a gun (or several).

The Hunting Wives is also an unapologetic raunchy celebration of things considered “taboo” that shouldn’t be — like female desire and queerness. The series’s frank depiction of these themes unsurprisingly led to some backlash, with Hunting Wives showrunner Rebecca Cutter defending the show, but this only increased curiosity, as proven by Google Trends.

The Hunting Wives Will Return For Season 2

Lionsgate/Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection

Hunting Wives fans spent much of summer 2025 on tenterhooks waiting to see if Netflix would renew the show for a second season. The streaming platform is infamous for the number of TV shows it cancels, but it’s typically quick to greenlight more episodes of something popular. So, it was confusing that there was no word on the future of a streaming chart-topper like The Hunting Wives.

Essentially, the reason for the delay had to do with complicated licensing rights issues that thankfully got ironed out. On September 12, nearly two months after the release of season 1, Netflix posted a humorous video featuring a feuding Brittany Snow and Malin Akerman announcing that The Hunting Wives was indeed coming back for season 2.

Though there is no current release date for The Hunting Wives season 2, Netflix announced in November that filming is officially underway. In addition to Snow and Akerman, The Hunting Wives season 2 cast will include the returning Karen Rodriguez and Hunter Emery as Deputy Wanda Salazar and Deputy Walter Flynn, respectively. Branton Box will also reprise his guest-starring role as Sheriff Johnny.

While most of the major plot details are still under wraps, The Hunting Wives season 2’s official log line is: “Sophie and Margo are on the outs. But soon enough, old secrets and new foes force them back together. As they play their dangerous games, the question arises. Are they the hunters or the hunted?“

With a juicy premise like that, there’s every chance that The Hunting Wives will find itself back at the top of Google Trends’ TV chart.

Source: Google, Netflix

Release Date

July 21, 2025

Network

Netflix

Directors

Julie Anne Robinson

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  Brittany Snow

  Sophie O’Neill

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  Malin Akerman

  Margo Banks