All in the Family

Let them eat cake: Ginnifer Goodwin, Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Chloë Sevigny star in Big Love. Courtesy of HBO.

If there were fears that HBO had run out of original twists on domestic life after Six Feet Under’s finale last year and the impending end of The Sopranos, Big Love, a new suburban drama set in Salt Lake City, Utah, will put them to rest. Starring Bill Paxton as Bill Henrickson, an aspiring home improvement store mogul with three houses, three wives and seven kids, the show makes running a funeral home or controlling a crime syndicate seem almost banal by comparison. In fact, Big Love offers something almost never before seen on television: a truly alternative family. 

Bill heads his household — three adjacent homes with a communal backyard — on a quiet upscale street, where vigilance is required to keep nosy neighbours in the dark about the family’s situation. It’s a sharp contrast to the place Bill grew up, an off-the-grid community of polygamists called Juniper Creek, which is led by a shrewd, scam-artist prophet named Roman. All of Bill’s wives have willingly chosen the lifestyle and appear to be content — to varying degrees. Bill has denounced formal religion, but remains devout (while hunting with his eldest son, he asks God to bless the boy’s new gun). Though Bill’s father kicked him out when he was 14 — young men being competition for old geezers seeking their eighth or ninth wife — Bill can’t entirely cast off his ties to his family. Nor does he fit in to Salt Lake City’s Mormon community, which banned polygamy a century ago and still fears the stigma brought to its church by renegade congregations like Juniper Creek (which bears no small resemblance to the Mormon splinter group in Bountiful, B.C., part of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). If Bill’s found out, he could go to jail, or at the very least lose his reputation and his business. His family’s insularity, and the paranoia it breeds, runs as a quiet but palpable current in every episode.

The casting of Paxton, whose mild good looks recall a 1960s sitcom dad, is one of Big Love’s many inspired choices. Bill doesn’t have the physical heft or quite the psychological baggage of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, but he’s no less compelling as a burdened patriarch trying to live up to his own moral code. A decent man who loves and respects his wives, dotes on his kids and rarely raises his voice, he is less driven by lust — though the show has plenty of that, it is HBO after all — than by what Mormon forefathers called “the principle” of multiple marriage. (And there are other, murkier, reasons for Bill’s situation as the show slowly reveals.) Even the enviable encumbrance of three attractive, libidinous wives can overtax poor Bill, yet he manages to keep up with demand courtesy of Viagra.

The women of Big Love are no less richly rendered. First wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) works as a substitute teacher, is critical of the child-bride marriages at Juniper Creek and, though she attends events with Bill as his official wife, chafes the most at their situation. Still, as the least volatile of the bunch, it’s she who keeps the peace and who organizes Bill’s if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-the-second-wife schedule. Next in line is prim and prairie-skirted Nicki (Chloë Sevigny), one of Roman’s numerous children. (Her retro hairdo and so-bad-they’re-good clothes feel like an inside joke; in real life, Sevigny is a notorious fashion Chernobyl.) Petty, manipulative and up to her eyeballs in credit-card debt, Nicki snipes at Barb and bosses around pretty and puppy-like Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), the youngest and most junior of the wives.

My three wives: the women of Big Love. Courtesy of The Movie Network.

These housewives aren’t so much desperate as deeply conflicted. They struggle with jealousy while enjoying their sisterly bonds, shifting allegiances as Bill shifts his affections. To cope, Nicki shops, Barb is controllingly stoic and Margene rebels by wearing derriere-baring robes and befriending a snoopy neighbour. Upping the tensions are Bill and Barb’s horny and tormented teenaged son and their quietly judgmental daughter (“Sarah has three mommies,” teases one of her in-the-know friends, much to Sarah’s mortification); and Bill’s legal battle with Roman (played with creepy élan by Harry Dean Stanton), an original investor in Bill’s business, who now wants a bigger cut.

Creators Marv V. Olsen and Will Scheffer resist what must be an enormous temptation to play any of this for camp. Better still, they take their time in revealing the plotlines and the characters’ connections. Patient viewing pays off: three or four episodes in and gosh darn it, as Bill would say, if you aren’t hooked. What makes Big Love compulsively watchable is how stealthily it all begins to seem normal. The show’s internal logic is so meticulously created that even as the characters confound expectations of what we might do, for them the arrangement feels utterly right. When Nicki suspects that Bill is dating a potential fourth wife (he’s actually sneaking some extra time in with Barb), she’s not jealous, she’s thrilled. “I’m so bored with the other two wives,” she complains to a friend. And when Bill’s mom dismisses Margene for being too young and bubble-headed, it’s Barb who comes to her rescue. “Look at the lovely ring we bought her,” Barb points out to their mutual mother-in-law.

Which isn’t to say that the Henrickson household is presented as a utopia. Far from it: Barb is frustrated by the other wives’ objections to her job, Margene is lonely, Nicki feels like a misfit and Bill’s life would be a whole lot easier if he had just settled down with Barb. Yet this family, for all its problems, manages to work — and manages to suck you in even as you might be shaking your head at the oddness of it all.

At least one conservative pundit has suggested that the show’s non-judgmental take on polygamy is a Trojan horse to champion same-sex marriage, but the show’s politics don’t play out so simply. Roman argues that polygamists should co-opt the relationship rights that gay activists have won in order to further their own cause, but his first wife is aghast when a journalist quotes him as saying “polygamists are just like homosexuals.” And when a friend suggests that Barb’s antiwar stance makes her a closet Democrat, she’s quick to deny it. These people may be polygamists, but gosh darn it, they are God-fearing Republican ones.

Big Love premieres March 12 on The Movie Network.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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