With a cast so sterling that it’s breathtaking, “Big Love” is part daring TV, part “Desperate Housewives”
WITH the publication in the last few years of two phenomenal books – “The Poet and the Murderer,” by Simon Worrall, which follows the path from Mormon forgery to murder, and “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer, which tells of the savage murders of a young wife and child by her Mormon fundamentalist brothers-in-law – it had to be only a matter of time before plural marriage – and the strangeness of Mormon life – came to TV.
Enter “Big Love” (as in “bigamy”), the HBO show that is guaranteed to be one of the highest-rated premieres in cable history because it will air Sunday nights after “The Sopranos” starting next month.
Since an official review will come closer to the premiere, I will only tell you that watching “Big Love” was like watching “Six Feet Under” for the first time.
With a cast so sterling that it’s breathtaking, “Big Love” is part daring TV and part “Desperate Housewives” – with the housewives being especially desperate because three of them share one husband. In suburbia, yet!
That husband is home-improvement mogul Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton). His wives are Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin, who plays Johnny Cash’s first wife in “Walk the Line”).
Into perfect suburbia comes this shadowy, scary world of backwoods fundamentalist families, including Nicki’s dad – Roman The Prophet (Harry Dean Stanton) – and Bill’s parents – Bruce Dern and the great, great Grace Zabriskie, both so good here, they’re scary.
As interesting as Paxton’s Bill is – and make no mistake, bigamist Bill is in most ways a typical 40-something, retro-suburbanite as average as you can get (with, of course, three big exceptions) – it’s the wives and their dynamic that captures and holds fast.
Barb is a gorgeous, J. Crewlooking wife and mom who had a hysterectomy and can’t produce anymore future loonies, which is why big Bill took other wives.
Nicki, who comes from the backwoods compound run by “daddy” Roman, is a prairiedress wearing, sulking shopaholic who has sunk herself and her two little boys deep into debt (a lot of it from online buying, and a lot of it from being a mall crawler).
Margene – the youngest wife – used to work at Bill’s giant home-improvement store, but apparently didn’t have much talent for stocking shelves, so she became Mrs. Henrickson the third. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have much talent for mothering either, but is a heck of a hotshot in the sack.
Barb tries to keep the wives in sync, but the younger women have minds of their own: They want plural marriage all right, but still would prefer to keep their plural man mostly to themselves.
Think three Carmelas and one Tony – Mormon style.
While “Big Love” goes out of its way to avoid actually using “The Church of Latter-Day Saints” or “Mormon” as the religion, the characters refer to themselves as lapsed members. (For what it’s worth, HBO uses disclaimers to explain that the Mormon Church officially banned the practice of polygamy in 1890.)
“Big Love,” at first, left me confused (as in “What the hell am I watching here?”) and then riveted.
I sat through five straight hours of “Big Love” and was left begging for more.
But hey – when is any amount of “Love” big enough?