A Polygamous Plight

National Review Online: New TV Show Humanizes Polygamy

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Louis Wittig.

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Being a cultural conservative is monotonous. Everything is in a perpetual state of going to hell. Two things can really break the routine. The first is when the slippery slope becomes a high-speed luge track.

Like now. In late 2004, amid a boiling gay-marriage debate, law professor Jonathan Turley argued the case for legalizing polygamy in a USA Today op-ed. But, he added:

[The] day of social acceptance will never come for polygamists. It is unlikely that any network is going to air "The Polygamist Eye for the Monogamist Eye" or add a polygamist twist to "Everybody Loves Raymond."

In a few days, HBO will pass the crown of edgy, phenomenon programming to Big Love: an hour drama about Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), a suburban businessman in Salt Lake City, and his wife, his other wife, his other other wife (three, total), and kids (probably about six).

Big Love is an example of that rare second thing that can interrupt conservatives' parade of sighs: a show that, if you think about it, does eat away at a pillar of society. But a show that you don't think about like that — because it's too good.

Like the Sopranos, the Henricksons are everyday people who are, simultaneously, about as different from HBO's everyday viewers as they can be without growing additional eyes in the middle of their foreheads. Barb Henrickson (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is reaching for a life outside the home by substitute teaching. She's the first wife, and she hates it when wife two, Nicki (Chlöe Sevigny), calls her "boss lady." Nicki, a spoiled daddy's girl, runs up impossible credit-card debts. Daddy, incidentally, is Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the whitebread godfather of a Mormon fundamentalist compound in the hills, who hovers over the family like a cloud of incipient violence. Wife three, Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), is lonely. She wants to make friends with the neighbors. If she succeeds, however, the socially unacceptable cat will get out of the bag and the Henricksons will be destroyed.

In the middle of everything is Bill. He's trying to open his second home-improvement mega-store. He's trying to satisfy all three wives (episode two title: "Viagra Blue"). He's trying to figure out who's poisoning his unhinged, especially polygamist father. He's trying to remember whose bed he's sleeping in on any given night. He's trying to listen to 16 voicemail messages while he's driving. The pressure flattens the character out somewhat. There's hardly time to notice.