shoop and big love

Do you have a friend or loved one that you always worry about? They're always getting themselves in trouble, and if they had maybe a little more common sense, or a little more insight, or were a little less stubborn or naive, they wouldn't always find themselves in the messes they're inevitably in.


If you enter the world of Big Love, you're going to find yourself worrying a lot. You'll worry about Bill, the affable polygamist played with matchless regular-guyness by matchless regular guy Bill Paxton. And you'll worry about his three wives, and their brood of kids. After this season, Bill now finds himself in the state senate, and there's more to worry about than ever, because the more open he tries to be with his "secret" life, the more this stubbornly holy man--that's the most frustrating/appealing aspect of Bill, the fact that he really believes he's doing the work and living the life that "Heavenly Father" wants him to lead--has to make deals with all kinds of devils, imps, and lesser and greater demons.


And what a cast of demons--there's Harry Dean Stanton as Roman, the Prophet and leader of the Juniper Creek compound, the aggregation of hard-core polygymists from which Bill was expelled as a teenager. Stanton is the righteous, slimy, holier-than-thou demon of many of our nightmares, and yet there's that tender side, too, the side the late John Hughes tapped into for Pretty in Pink. There's Sissy Spacek, too, having the time of her life playing a sneaky lobbyist in full snarl, a color I don't believe Spacek has ever tried on (yeah, she killed a bunch of people in Carrie, but she was a victim first).


But it might be the wives who make the show. You might think you know everything about them after the first episode--Jeanne Tripplehorn as Barb, First Wife, the Sensible One, Chloe Sevigny as Nicki, Second Wife, the scheming one, and Ginnifer Goodwin as Margene, Third Wife, the giddy, goofy one. And so they are, but there's more to all three of them, much to each other's and their own surprise, especially as Bill becomes more and more self-centeredly goal-driven.

Still, I'm not doing this show justice. I could talk about the show's unique juxtaposition of the ordinariness of the characters with the outrageous things they say and do, but that's a very general description. It's little details, like the casual way Bill has to pluralize everything, as in, "I don't want them in my homes" (each wife and set of kids has a separate neighboring house). Or the way no one in the family will curse, but how much anger they put into their substitute curse words: "What the h-- is going on?!" or "Now wait a g-d minute," or perhaps the ultimate putdown, "F-- you, Barb!" That's when you start to like these people. And then, of course, comes the worrying. Followed, naturally, by the impatience of waiting for the next season.