Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan — nay, expert — and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.
My intentions, as ever, were good: Utilize the Thanksgiving break to dive into the newest season of The Crown, or catch up on sitcom favorites like The Good Place and Superstore. However, I am a fallible human sinner. The Thanksgiving break, instead, stirred up within me (like so much gravy) the joys of stodgy comforts, the goony beloved. Why use this free time to enjoy, like, a new thing, when I can rewatch Big Love for the, I don’t know, fourth or fifth time?
You think I’m a fallible human sinner? Friends, Big Love has it all: compound-living polygamists who are at one point involved in an international exotic bird-smuggling scam; frequent poisonings; Sissy Spacek. There’s a soapy luridness to the whole proceeding, as befits an HBO show. The network’s dramas, for whatever reason, are generally filed under “Prestige.” But the Taxicab Confessions roots hold Big Love firmly in the ground, and the show really makes you work for it — expect to see rear side of Bill Paxton’s scrotum in the first few episodes.
Paxton portrays Bill Henrickson, proud owner of two hardware stores and three wives (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin, in order of precedence) who “finds himself” (through his own bad decision making) sucked back into the chaos of the remote polygamist compound he grew up on. And because Bill spent his childhood on that compound raised to believe he was a leader and prophet, he also “finds himself” sucked into the wider world of politics, finance, anywhere he can pursue power and profit.
Please don’t think the show necessarily has anything to say about patriarchy, other than some people take it a little far. Big Love is wildly stupid, with an actual storyline in which a crazy person is implanting incest embryos in women all around town. There are miscarriages, rapes and a corpse in a freezer, and very little of it is “earned.” There was an attempt, kinda, in the first couple of seasons to add an air of complicated Wild West whimsy to the proceedings, mostly through using Mark Mothersbaugh and/or David Byrne for music, plus the occasional fades to black. Mostly, though, it was things like Bill looking in his bathroom mirror — a triple-mirror vanity (symbolism).
And as blithe as the show can be about the sordid goings-on down here on the physical, earthly realm, it’s even more vague about the spiritual lives and backgrounds of its characters — we’re generally meant to believe that Bill believes it when he thinks he’s acting in the name of God, but so does every other villain on the show. Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Barb is the most interesting character, spiritually — a typical conservative Mormon, proud of her Utah pioneer roots, who nevertheless leaves behind the religion she was raised to believe was her salvation out of deference to her husband, one of TV’s all-time-great morons.
I suppose if Big Love has any thesis, it’s that Bill Henrickson suuuucks. Something has pulled me back again and again to this mess, and maybe that’s it: Patriarch as Buffoon. In a Season 1 hunting sequence, Bill tries to teach his son about the best ways to avoid wolves on the prowl. Subtle as a sledgehammer to the sternum, Bill is obviously referencing his feud with compound usurper Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), and then proceeds to act in the exact opposite fashion. One of my plans for this viewing of the series is to keep tabs on how many times Bill digs himself and his family deeper into the mire thanks to his world-class poor decision making.
His family — oh yeah, Bill has a family. The kids are the point for the entire Henrickson clan — they attempt to heed the call to bring another soul down to earth who can eventually live with the entire gang in the Celestial Kingdom. Will Bill try to marry a particularly foxy angel while in heaven? That’s unclear, but what is clear is that Big Love figured out pretty early on they had way too many kids to deal with, and culled as the years went by. Amanda Seyfried’s character (eldest daughter Sarah) started dating a pre-Jesse Pinkman Aaron Paul, so she stuck around.
That’s the other big appeal of Big Love: watching engaging actors do their thing. Bill Paxton made me fully believe that Bill Henrickson sucks. Matt Ross (one of the best on Silicon Valley) is one of the best on Big Love, his Alby Grant a savvy, stupid, complicated villain, heir to the throne Bill thought was his. Bruce Dern, Grace Zabriskie, Tina Majorino, Mireille Enos, Anne Dudek, Željk Ivanek — if you are into actors willing to go hard on some weird shit, have I go the show for you. Consider this a recommendation. I know it’s not nuanced and is probably very rude to Mormons. But keep in mind — there is a character who somehow confuses “hard-right religious polygamy” with “free love,” and it’s extremely funny.
