Big Love
Winters in South Bend are long, and there’s something especially long and depressing about a Sunday night in winter.
You need distractions. And one of the best distractions this particularly long winter has been Big Love, a series on HBO about a polygamous Mormon family trying to make it away from the compound and in the Salt Lake City suburbs. It’s very entertaining–a well-done soap opera. But it also contains some interesting insights about contemporary life, especially contemporary family life.
I have a half-completed essay on the show, which I’m planning on putting together eventually in a volume of collected essays on theology and popular culture, which will hopefully include my articles on the Sopranos and Buffy from Commonweal.
Anyone else watch Big Love?
There you go again, Cathy. My daughter loves the show. Maybe I have not given it a chance but it bothers me that the other wife is in another house hearing the sexual screams of another wife on her “chosen” night. I am squeamish about it the way I am about the bachelor. Certainly there are valid moments similar to authentic love in both. But….
Of course, I am squeamish, better word, disdainful, of soap operas.
Bill, the explicit sex scenes were more the first season–a teaser–. Now, it’s much more about the relationships. Very few sex scenes this year.
I watched a couple episodes in the first season, and it started to suck me in — but before long I felt like there were too many interesting plot threads getting started, and I got impatient waiting for them to focus on any one of them in depth. I think I got burned after falling for The Riches (on FX). That show ended the first season with a lot of plot lines suspended and apparently unresolvable, and I couldn’t wait to see how they were going to tie everything up in season two. But when season two finally came around, it was obvious that the writers were just making it up as they went along. They had no master plan to resolve any of the stories; they were just piling on more unexpected twists for the sake of it. So I felt conned, and I was wary of getting invested in another show that traded in suspense when I wasn’t confident the writers would follow through on their promises. I do still stop on it from time to time, though. Chloe Sevigny, especially, is just too good to look away from!
Mollie, you might want to stop by again soon. Choloe Sevigny’s character, Nicki (the daughter of the fundamentalist prophet Roman Grant) who is Bill’s second wife, has taken the name of the third wife Margene, to work at the DA’s office to find out info about the witnesses testifying against her father in a Mann Act case. She likes working–and the DA she’s working for. In fact, she’s tentatively agreed to date him. Something, needless to say, that wouldn’t go over well with Bill.
So. . . the question raised is whether polygamy is only for men.
I actually, for the record, don’t think this functions as a brief for plural marriage–the whole thing is too exhausting.
But it’s very entertaining on a cold, gray winter night. It’s a giant train wreck in slow motion–and most of the characters have a redeeming quality that makes you care what happens to them.
Haven’t seen the show, but we don’t have cable or satellite, and so far I’ve been able to hold the line against more TV intrusion.
But the fellow who plays the husband was interviewed on “Fresh Air” last week talking about how he pitches his character. It sounds like an interesting show. Show is archived I’m sure, and I’d provide the link, except I’m on spring break!
Cathleen has written so compellingly about some of these TV shows, that I’ve taken to renting them on DVD. I bought all seven seasons of “Buffy,” and that’s the monkey on the back of Raber and son.
I’ve also rented some seasons of “The Sopranos.” I’m hooked, but Raber finds it off-putting. Half Italian himself (northern roots on the Austro-Hungarian border). Doesn’t like the way Italians are always portrayed as killers and crooks.
Which made me wonder what the Mormon response to “Big Love” is.
Good question, Jean. Let me see if I can find out.