LITTLE ROCK — There is a temptation for me to make too much of Big Love, HBO’s series about a polygamist family living just under the radar in Utah. I don’t watch much television (more precisely, I don’t watch much programming that is made specifically for television), and my attachment to Big Love probably has as much to do with its time slot (8 p.m. Sunday) as it does with the show’s content. Since I got hooked on The Sopranos in 1999, I have been trained to look for something to watch - or DVR - there.
For Big Love is really just another soap opera, albeit one so densely packed that a single episode yields more consequential plot points than a season’s worth of the old General Hospital. Despite its setting, it is not really about cult religions, plural marriage or even about the hubris of Bill Hendrickson (Bill Paxton), the overachieving patriarch at the show’s center. Big Love, like every TV show that has ever had a cast of regular recurring characters, is a show about family.
And families, as everyone who has experience with them should know, are crazy institutions. Big Love amplifies the petty madnesses of domestic life; it juices them up with melodrama and has them play out against backdrops that are alternately comfortingly familiar (a sunny, unpretentious suburb where Hendrickson owns three adjacent houses, one for each of his wives), bizarre (the creepy Juniper Creek polygamist compound, Bill’s ancestral home) and surreal (the “family-friendly” casino the family runs in partnership with the Wyoming Indian tribe).
While it’s hardly useful to delve too deeply into intricacies of plot in this space, let’s just say that last season’s criminal investigation into the charismatic leader of the Juniper Creek community - Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton),father of Bill’s wife Nicolette (Chloe Sevigny) - threatened to spill over into the lives of the Hendricksons, jeopardizing their polygamist lifestyle and their financial security.
This season opened with those problems swept away, but as befits a man with three wives, Bill would not be satisfied. Now he wants to make a stand, to be able to adhere to “The Principle” (as they describe plural marriage) in a public way. To do this, he’s determined, he must run for the state senate. Which means he is going to have to play ball with the established powers, to - for at least a little while longer - pretend to be nothing more than an upstanding business leader.
To this end, he has sought to reconnect with the Mormon church - an institution he abandoned in order to follow The Principle. Already this season, he has forced his first wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who last season had been excommunicated from the Latter-day Saints, to grovel before a church elder to gain re-admittance. Bill - in the past a proudly defiant, obstinate man - has adopted a strategy of duplicitous, expedient compromise. The season looks promising.
Snobs have always dismissed television, because it is a ubiquitous commodity. Throw the switch and it runs like a faucet, the most ordinary of appliances oozing out a mortar in which clever salesmen embed advertising.We can take television programs as something insidious: Trojan horses presented as gifts and brought inside the home, their hollow insides crawling with bad intent.
But that’s a simplistic and wrong-headed way to look at television - “sophisticated” viewers use TV at least as often as TV uses them. Often we get the jokes and laugh at the shows in spite of them, not because of them - even mean-spirited reality shows like American Idol can contribute moments of useful community.
Because it was imagined as a kind of utility, television has always been a distinctively different character than theater or the movies or any sort of entertainment that would require users to seek it out.Television was designed to be part of the household routine, a quotidian thing that sat in the corner of what we called “living room,” a tap to be used with the automatic regularity of a sink.
Television was a guest in people’s houses, and its audience was not entirely self-selected; toddlers and infants and grandmothers were as likely to gather around the electronic hearth as legal adults. It could not be overly boisterous or rude.
From its very beginning, television has been for families, so it isn’t surprising that the essential paradigm of television has always been the family. In the 1950s, these reflections included Ozzie and Harriet Nelson; the Andersons of Father Knows Best; Ward and June and Wally and the Beav. In the 1960s, Mayberry provided an extended tribe for Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea, and Bonanza gave us the curious example of the Cartwrights, whose paterfamilias kept losing wives to freak tragedies.
(Pernell Roberts, who played eldest son Adam Cartwright, died last week. He was the last surviving regular cast member. Reading his obituary, I discovered he’d left the show after the 1964-65 season, in part because he no longer wanted to help perpetuate what he called “junk TV.” He’d accused the show’s producers and NBC, the network that broadcast it, of “perpetuating banality and contributing to the dehumanization of the industry.”)
Irony on television didn’t start with David Letterman; his only real innovation was to put on the tube what a lot of us were already doing in our living rooms. Americans have been goofing on television for a long time, and dull witted and the ulterior-motivated take TV at face value.
The rest of us can use it like a cheap, numbing drug; we can stare at it and choose whether to be amused. Americans are so TV-wise; we know its conventions, its customs and manners. We know that its little 22-minute comedy skits punctuated by commercials will turn out all right in the end. We know no real and lasting harm will come to the Hendrickson clan - at least not before the series finale.
Television is harmless to most of us. Its crazy-making rays mostly bounce off our milk-thickened American skulls; we notice it like we notice wallpaper - only sometimes. There is no need to fear television, there is no need to take it seriously.
Big Love skirts around some serious issues - I had a good friend who was excommunicated by the Mormons, and I believe that had something to do with her eventual suicide - but it doesn’t engage them in a serious way.
Juniper Creek is an imaginary construct, crafted from observed specific details, perhaps, but essentially no more real than any of the backdrops on Bonanza. And if there really are suburban polygamists who hide in plain sight like Bill, they’d have to be less reckless, more humble than this self-aggrandizing jerk.
And that’s wh at Bill Hendrickson essentially is - though maybe we receive and tolerate him the way we do the boors and bigots and hypocrites in our own families. For familiarity doesn’t really breed contempt, it breeds a kind of charity, an acceptance of others’ inherent limitations.
Unlike movie stars, the people on TV are generally smaller than life, and we accept them into our homes casually. We develop relationships with TV characters, and, after repeated exposures, the social anxiety of an Archie Bunker can become touching.We can understand him not as a cartoon bigot but as a man frightened by a future he can neither understand nor forestall. We make allowances for TV characters that we generally don’t for movie heroes.
Big Love has a novel setting, but it is not a new idea - it reminds me in some ways of The Brady Bunch (who, in the fraught words of the theme song, sought to “somehow form a family”). Bill’s three wives can in some respects be compared to King Lear’s three daughters, or as different iterations of the concept “love.”
Barb is constant and companionable, the captain wife and - if you want a Freudian breakdown - a kind of familial superego. Nicolette is erratic and oft-frightened, insecure and dangerously self-destructive. And the youngest, Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), is enthusiastic and unafraid,a still-fresh conquest. They are not real people, they are obviously the creations of a screenwriter’s mind, pieces to be moved through an artificially complicated game.
It is sufficiently convoluted and resonant of life to engage us, it is something to look forward to, to follow along with and to talk - or, more to the point, gossip - about. But Big Love is no big deal.
And that’s the key to its appeal.
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Style, Pages 27 on 02/02/2010