HBO dramedy series Big Love was conceived as an over-elaborate, 12-episode answer to a simple question: Is polygamy as exciting as it sounds? If Utah polygamist and entrepreneur Bill Henrikson’s nightmare-a-minute home life is any indication, this DVD should be shelved in your local Blockbuster’s “anti-polygamy” section. Surprisingly, though, not all these episodes are tweaked for maximum freak-show effect; mostly, the Henrickson family’s snowballing troubles are the mundane, logical results of their decidedly non-nuclear family structure.
Henrickson (Bill Paxton) owns an up-and-coming bigbox chain of stores, Home Plus, in Salt Lake City. He also owns three houses—each with a different wife and his ever-growing collection of unquantifiable children. Bill’s first wife, Barbara (Jeanne Tripplehorn), is naturally the older, bossy matriarchal figure; second wife Nikki (Chloe Sevigny) has violent mood swings and a shopping sickness; the third wife, Margie (Ginnifer Goodwin), is simply an incompetent airhead—except in the bedroom.
Simply put, the series stresses the inconveniences of running a multimillion-dollar business while managing revolving wives. For Bill, the biggest struggle seems to be providing an equal distribution of sexual satisfaction (accomplished with regular 100mg doses of boner pills). It’s also tough to screw one wife without the others becoming jealously aware of the deed. Eavesdropping among wives is rampant, resulting in an over-reliance on household secretiveness. And speaking of secrets, it’s also tough keeping those meddlesome neighbors from discovering any damning multi-spousal mischief.
Unfortunately, these characters are crammed too tightly into their respective behavioral boxes, and the narrative lens isn’t quite wide enough to cover ample ground in Bill’s hyper-extended family. The story engine putters along with some consistency, propelled mostly by Nikki’s 14-wife polygamist father Roman (Harry Dean Stanton)—possibly the creepiest onscreen religious figure since Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter. For the right to marry Nikki, Bill had promised Roman a partial share of Home Plus profits. This pact sparks a see-sawing, series-long conflict between the two parties.
Behind Big Love stands a Big Idea, but for all its darkly comedic potential, the series can’t quite close the gap between idea and execution. As with Bill Henrickson’s own sexual predicament, the show’s ambitions are too splintered to be consistently potent.
