Tpotdomescandal’s Top 10 TV Shows

#10: Big Love

Big Love is an HBO drama, currently between its second and third seasons. It has the two main characteristics of other critically-acclaimed pay cable dramas: terrific acting, and a view of the modern American suburban family represented by an extremely unusual and dysfunctional family.

Big Love is about a modern day polygamist, Bill (Bill Paxton), and his three wives, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), and Nicki (Chloe Sevigny). The show features drama, action, comedy, and romance as Bill moves among his interconnected worlds. There’s his public persona as a normal (monogamous) successful Mormon businessman, there’s his relationship to a shadowy compound of breakaway Mormon fundamentalists, and his family life, which itself is partially compartmentalized. One of the striking realizations is that, regardless of religious upbringing or personal background, fans can’t help but root for this family, and root for it in it’s current form. Nicki is a terrific character who is manipulative, passive-aggressive, and compulsive, yet strangely likeable (to me, anyway).

Family is a major theme of the show. I especially like how the show ends up touching on the concerns of everyday families, even though Bill’s is anything but an everyday family. Spirituality is very important in the show, which features Mormons, breakaway polygamist sects led by creepy “prophets,” and a genuine, albeit strange theology that permeates the lives of Bill and his family. There’s plenty of skepticism of the government, from the full-on defiance of the polygamist compounds, to Bill’s attitude that he just wishes he and his family would be left alone.

Big Love homepage.

Time review.