The season finale of this brief, nine-episode season of Big Love was last night, and I cannot remember the last time I’ve seen a bigger disaster lurch its way toward Bethlehem to be born. Let me just try to recap what happens in the last episode, although I know it’s a failed enterprise. Barb tries to sabotage Bill’s campaign by leaking the paternity test of Ana’s baby to the press. Margene confesses to Ana that she wants to get a divorce from Ana’s fiancé Goran, and Ana insists they all stay together. Albie goes mad(der than he already was). Bill fires the two guys who were running the casino, which infuriates Barb, who’s been actually doing the major work there. We discover that JJ, Nikki’s ex-husband and her mother’s new husband, has been carrying out an elaborate incestuous eugenics scheme at his compound in Kansas. JJ has implanted Adaleen, Nikki’s mother, with an embryo that is not hers and tries to implant Nikki with an embryo made from JJ’s sperm and Nikki’s daughter’s egg, but Bill charges in and interrupts everything. Adaleen ties up JJ and his other wife whose name I’ve never caught and burns them alive inside the clinic. At the end, Bill Hendrickson wins a Utah State Senate seat and then uses his victory speech to announce that he is a polygamist.

I think that’s most of it, plus there’s a whole Sissy Spacek plotline that I never did quite understand. Oh, also, Don’s son throws a brick through the Hendricksons’s window? And Nikki doesn’t want to share Bill anymore? And who even knows what happened to that whole bird smuggling business!

A few days ago, FlowTV reprinted some of its most popular or thought-provoking works from the past several years, and included Michael Kackman’s piece about television criticism’s perpetual confusion of “narrative complexity” for “quality.” He points to the academic love affair with The Wire, the weekly Lost hand-wringing, and HBO’s entire brand as a form of elitist aesthetics that ignore “good” television’s underlying roots in melodrama. Kackman pushes the concept of melodrama (historically a female aesthetic) as a crucial player in the development of television shows now considered “good,” and asks critics to remember the gender politics that create the foundation of our aesthetic appreciation for complex narrative. I mention this all because Big Love falls in an interesting place in Kackman’s divide. It is narratively complex, and it proudly owns its relationship with melodrama, so much so that it frequently and cheerfully steps over the line of plausibility. It could be an excellent, daring, experimental leap into a gold mine of televised genius, combining all the complicated fascination of a multi-plot structure with the crazy unreality of a melodramatic romance. On screen, Big Love is a mess. Its characters get buried in the onslaught of plotlines and its themes are muddled inside screaming emotional outbursts and near-weekly murderous rages. Bill Hendrickson is a dolt.

While I will cop to a critical bias toward narrative complexity and should try to recognize the importance of understanding the role of melodrama in our (probably gendered) operational aesthetics, quality can exist independent of those considerations. Good TV can be made using the techniques of what used to be “bad” TV – see Mad Men, which is essentially a soap opera with better production values, and we should make an effort to re-evaluate those (cough cough) low-culture forms that have developed into what now makes up (cough) high-culture television. But I have to thank Big Love for proving so clearly that a narratively complex show can also still be messy, incoherent (bad!) TV.

I continue to struggle with Big Love and its perpetual substitution of “more” for “more interesting.” But last night’s episode is a good example of how the show can sometimes approach coherency, as well as a reminder of why the entire Juniper Creek plotline was even a part of this show to begin with. This whole season is built on a problem – Bill Henrickson running for State Senate is such a wacky, unlikely idea that it’s difficult to move past it and consider anything else going on in the show – but in episodes like “Sins of the Father” you can glimpse the plan underneath the craziness.

As has been noted again and again about this show, everything that happens in the Henrickson family is so complex, twisty, and fascinating that it’s baffling why any episode would waste time with the unsubtle, overwrought Juniper Creek gang. Big Love has made it too easy to forget why we should care about Juniper Creek at all, and “Sins of the Father” did a far better job of sewing together those plot threads than any other episode in recent memory. Juniper Creek haunts the Henrickson family, but their worlds are so distant that it becomes difficult to see the meaningful connections: I could care less about Bill’s mother’s absurd Mexican bird smuggling scheme. But when the Mormon lost boy story makes the news and Bill is forced to go on record about his past, suddenly the emotional impact of Juniper Creek becomes a live wire. Bill’s teenage mug shot is plastered all over his campaign office, and it’s as if this enormous and meaningful aspect of the Juniper Creek plotline is staring out of those posters, literally overlaying this ridiculous State Senate story with the glaring history of Bill’s misdeeds. Bill’s father exiled him at fourteen, and Bill has now thrown his own son out of the house for the same kinds of fear and jealousy that caused his own exile. Roman Grant is finally dead, and much as he’d like to deny it, Bill feels the same desire to seek power that comprises the foundation of his marriage and his family history. At least in the world of Big Love, the nature of polygamy brings about conflict between fathers and sons, and Bill has fallen into the same trap he desperately wanted to escape.

Instead of the typical scattershot, haphazard flickering between the casino, the Henrickson compound, what I now discover to be the ironically-named Henrickson’s Home Plus, any of the three households we follow in Juniper Creek, Sarah’s new life, and the entire State Senate story, “Sins of the Father” provides some order to the chaos. These stories are actually one story, telling the life history of this enigmatic man whose childhood abandonment has spurred him to constantly build himself newer, bigger homes. (“Build with Bill” – a lackluster campaign slogan proves more effective as a thesis.) And yet he falls prey to the same jealousies as his father, and throws his own son out of the house. The parallels are almost too neat. At this point, though, unless they’re hit-you-over-the-head obvious, they fail to withstand the sheer onslaught of other stories.

Am I supposed to be reading some metaphor here with all the caged birds? Because it's just too weird and uneven.

So – a good episode. A sad episode, full of a tragic Phillip Glass-like musical score and an uncharacteristically revealing portrait of Bill, who usually acts as the background for his more interesting wives. As effective as it was, it still doesn’t solve the deep problems with the show’s construction. Individual episodes rarely reach this kind of internal harmony, and the fact that Bill’s son Ben refuses to come home and is reaching out to his bird smuggling grandmother doesn’t bode well. Still, episodes like this are why I keep watching.

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.