What the average person actually knows about the Church of Latter Day Saints leaves a lot to the imagination as well as plenty of sources of misinformation. Though polygamy has long since been abolished by the mainstream Mormon Church and laws passed in Utah in the late 1800s, that’s not to say it doesn’t still exist in some form within its ever expanding community. For the sake of HBO’s series Big Love, polygamy remains alive and well within highly guarded communities with secrecy shrouding the internal happenings from the outside world. Over the course of five seasons, Big Love navigated through the complicated life of Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), a polygamist Mormon living outside the safe haven of the local polygamist sect’s grounds and who must consequently make his own way in the world while hiding the truth about his three-wife family from everyone around him. The series achieved a great many high points in its run, but a bit too often it submitted to melodrama to fill the spaces between some of the larger and more interesting story arcs.
The happy family unit Bill Henrickson has put together in his quiet Mormon neighborhood only barely withstands scrutiny from those who suspect there’s something else going on between the three houses seemingly connected by two fences. There’s Bill and Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in one, the “widowed” Nicolette (Chloe Sevigny) in another, and the young, abandoned Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) in the last. Between them all, a considerable number of children seem to run about with no hint of how they get from one house to the next visible from the street. As you might have guessed, this isn’t a couple and two singles living their lives in close proximity, but a man and his three wives doing their best to hide their polygamy from a Mormon community that could call the police on them if they ever found out. And so the Henricksons do their best to run a successful chain of hardware stores as they deal with teenagers seeing the consequences and benefits of polygamy, an exciting new venture into public gambling, constant threats from the polygamist compound they left behind, a sociopathic teenager threatening the compound and their family with exposure, a run at public office, and the debate over adding a fourth wife. Rarely, if ever, do the wives and Bill see eye to eye, and as a result decisions aren’t just debated morally, but diplomatically as well.
Most people watching Big Love do so from a vantage point far removed from Mormonism and even further still from a life of polygamy, and therefore there’s a kind of spectacle coating covering everything that happens. How can Barb be okay with sharing her husband? What kind of a woman actually wants to be the second or third wife? Isn’t that demeaning? To get past those questions, both the show’s writers and the audience have to do a bit of bending. Considering how Barb comes into the world of Mormonism and polygamy from a Catholic family, it seems almost impossible that she’d go along with Bill’s desire for a second, but the writer’s do a decent job of explaining how that came to be. They do a lesser job explaining how the third wife was added, but instead they give us the struggles of each wife as they still actively cope with the patriarchal system they’ve opted into.
Barb, despite seeming content with her mature marriage to Bill and their equally mature children, still grapples with her family exiling her as well as having to share the man whose love she once held exclusively. Nikki’s issues have closer ties to the constant battles with the polygamist sect as her marriage to Bill was something of a political maneuver: she, the daughter of the Prophet (Harry Dean Stanton) who ousted Bill’s family from control of the sect, and Bill, the man attempting to repair the breach between his growing family and the compound. Nikki’s loyalty comes into question, and rightfully so, again and again, as she struggles to maintain her connection to her large family still on the compound as well as Bill’s love for her. The latter battle has many obstacles, but the biggest might be Nikki’s reluctance to loosed her grasp of the polygamist sect’s dogma. Running as an almost complete contrast to Barb and Nikki is Margene who married Bill in her early 20s and has little life experience to help her cope with the odd life she joined. The perspectives of the wives change as Bill’s power plays have increasingly large impacts on the family, as the older children (Amanda Seyfried, Douglas Smith) begin making their own decisions, and as the secretive shroud of the compound slowly falls away leaving a lot destructive truths out in the open.
The almost inconceivable number of relationships making up the complex lattice of Big Love’s story presents both the series greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin form the backbone of the series’ plot, and the way their relationship’s dynamic shifts depending on who’s present in which conversation makes for a show that can evolve quickly and depends on character growth to move forward. On the other hand, far too often the show resorts to miscommunication to stir up shallow conflicts between Bill and his wives. How many times can Bill tell one of his wives a secret and not realize that the secrecy is going to come around and bite him in the behind? It’s a recurring device that gets downright aggravating by the third season, but by that point there are so many other things to keep track of that you’re better off tuning the show out for that minute of squabbling to do a recap in your head of all the politicking going on.
DVD Bonus Features
The extras in the complete series set range from quick mini-scenes that help to connect one episode to the next, Real World-esque video confessionals with the four married protagonists, and behind-the-scenes looks at certain episodes.
Or, if you’ve already bought the first four seasons individually up to this point, HBO has also just released the fifth season as a standalone set.
"Big Love: The Complete Collection" is on sale December 6, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Directed by Adam Davidson, Daniel Attias, David Petrarca, David Knoller. Written by Mark V. Olsen, Will Scheffer, Dustin Lance Black. Starring Amanda Seyfried, Bill Paxton, Chloe Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Douglas Smith, Matt Ross.
