Watching Big Love can be an exhausting experience. I feel for Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) and his trials. I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes. Or in and out of his three marital beds. Big Love is a HBO series that portrays the saga of a polygamous family living in Mormon-dominated Utah. It’s just your regular, normal suburban household, except that it consists of three side-by-side houses, all sharing one backyard.
Three houses means three wives - boss wife Barb, ever-pouting Nicki, and bouncy, busty Margie - and a bushel of kids. Bill somehow finds time to run a Home Depot type store in order to afford this brood. And in the pilot episode, amidst all the introductions to the myriad characters and inter-relationships, Bill discovers the magic pill that will help him keep up with the wives. Yes, Bill, doing a google search for Viagra will elicit a few hits. A few billion, I’m sure. And for once, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button will have extra resonance.
As one might imagine, this series is dominated by sex. All the wives are very good-looking, and not as reserved as good Mormons are assumed to be. The wives bicker with jealous fervor. Each one has a scheduled day (and night) with Bill - though they manage to find ways to cheat (if that’s the right word) the system and spend some extra quality romp time. Barb’s memorable motto is “Oral is Moral”. Margie has a tendency to be vocally enthusiastic and doesn’t remember to close her bedroom window - I guess Bill can’t find time to install central air for the moment. And Nicki just smolders seductively and proceeds to max out Bill’s credit cards at the first opportunity.
Of course, if we haven’t got the point by now, enter Bill’s derelict father (played by a disheveled Bruce Dern). As he reminds his son, when one lives in a polygamous community, the competition to wed the young girls is intense. Bill apparently got kicked out of the ‘compound’ when he reached puberty. And then there’s one of the father-in-laws, the mysterious Roman, who helped fund Bill’s business ventures and is intent on collecting his ten-percent tithe forever more. Roman’s new fourteen year-old bride is paraded in a creepy scene that will have the squeamish reaching for the remote.
The first two episodes leave the viewer hanging. Who is poisoning Bill’s father? Is it Bill’s mother? Or is it Roman, via the sip bottle of homemade brew that the camera looks at suspiciously, but no one ever comments on?
And more importantly, will Bill be able to renew his Viagra prescription in time?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment