Enormous, Overwhelming, Excessive Love
In all the kerfluffle over the late night change-ups and my own particular inclination towards all things Chuck, I neglected to mention that Showtime had a pretty big premiere this weekend as well – the beginning of the fourth season of Big Love.
The show centers on Bill Hendrickson, a man raised on an ultra-conservative Mormon compound in Utah, then abandoned by that compound, and then after his first wife’s struggle with cancer, Bill is drawn toward polygamy as the true will of God. Big Love splits its time between the complicated home life of a guy with three wives and a gazillion kids, and the politics of the Juniper Creek compound where Bill grew up. It’s been an understandably controversial program in its willingness to pierce or at least speculate about the inner workings of the Mormon church, as well as its occasionally unflattering depiction of both mainstream and unsanctioned expressions of Mormon faith.
Bill Paxton as Bill Hendrickson on Showtime's Big Love
The primary technique that structures Big Love’s form as well as its content is a tendency towards excess and overkill – there are wives and kids coming out the wazoo, and each episode is crammed full (and frequently overwhelmed) with plots and subplots that jostle against each other with varying degrees of discord. The content of those plots, particularly when the show deals with the Juniper Creek story, pushes against the boundaries of realism and reason. The whole compound is depicted as a corrupt, backwards frontierland, where the lack of computers and modern conveniences is used as a fictional justification for extreme, unrecognizable human behavior. In this opening episode of season four, Nicki Hendrickson (Bill’s second wife) returns to the compound to help her mother, who stages a no-holds-barred freak out over some bacon so that Nicki will go downstairs and discover her father, the compound’s prophet, frozen upright in the basement walk-in. There he is, eyes wide open, staring at Nicki from among the hanging slabs of beef. As if that isn’t bad enough, Nicki’s half-brother then drives the corpse out onto the construction site of Bill’s new casino and props him up for Bill to find.
Nicki discovers her father frozen in the basement, next to the bacon
At the same time, the storyline that deals with Bill’s struggle with his faith and the complex relationship between a man and his three wives almost always looks like real people coping with an immensely difficult situation. The politics and drama of Bill’s home can be funny, poignant, and frequently gutwrenching, and despite infrequent dips into crassness or absurdity, it’s fascinating to watch alliances, betrayals, and grudges unfold between these three women.
The pieces all make internal sense – you’ve got your completely crazy, unreal Mormon compound on the one side, and your unusual but believable family on the other – but if you take a step back, Big Love looks increasingly odd as a single unit. Harnessing a realistic portrayal of family life to a storyline that assumes an aura of fantasy and making each plot duke it out for primacy begins to look more and more like a stand-in for the bigger fantastic problem at the show’s core. Big Love struggles to connect the miracles, the discord with modern belief, and the utter, unshakable faith of Mormonism with its very real main characters. By tying Bill and his wives down with the totally bizarre, surreal Juniper Creek story, I think Big Love is attempting to use a defined, fictional way of yoking realism and mysticism together.
Margene, Barb and Nicki Hendrickson
It doesn’t really work. This latest episode had mere seconds to pivot from a jaunty, upbeat rendition of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” during Bill’s big casino opening, to a vocal adaptation of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” while Bill disposes of his father-in-law’s body. The episode also featured Nicki’s daughter from her previous, illegal marriage, Margene’s new career as a TV saleswoman, Bill’s new church, Albie’s secret gay life, and Bill’s mother’s wild bird resale scheme. It’s fascinating, and maybe even a laudable attempt to do the impossible. But it’s too much.