Big Love: Season 4

Once again, Big Love has gotten even better. I know I spent my last post talking about how the stakes had been raised, but Season 4 busts out some even bigger guns. Homosexuality, suicide, gang-style executions in Mexico, incest, banishment, infertility, blackmail - seriously, the shit has hit the fan and then some. By the end of this season, with just one more remaining, it's clear that things are not going to end well for the Hendrickson family. But in the interest of mixing things up, let me address two things I'm not loving. The first is that this season may have teetered a bit too far toward "ridiculous" with some of its story arcs. Ridiculous is better than boring, but come on, gang-style executions in Mexico? This used to be a story about a quirky family in the conservative Utah suburbs. I'm not complaining. I like crazy melodramatic Big Love a lot more than I liked quirky family sitcom Big Love. But if this show amps it up any harder next season, it'll be a full blown soap opera. Secondly, and more importantly, I'm just not a fan of the show's protagonist, Bill Hendrickson. Not every drama needs a complicated anti-hero like Walter White, Don Draper, or Tony Soprano at its center, but holy crap is this guy a snooze. I'm not sure if it's Bill Paxton's performance - I've never really disliked him in anything else, but then, what does that say? - or just the totally bland way he's written. I suppose if the idea is to paint him as an everyman, you can't give him much of a personality, but man, this guy lacks strengths, weaknesses, vices, skills - he just doesn't do anything. While his wives, his kids, his friends, and his rivals all plot and scheme and make mistakes, he just kind of steps trough it all, ineptly and without much of a reaction. Hey, fine. The characters around him are compelling enough to keep the show exciting. But Bill? Bill is a blank piece of paper.

Now, before I go, I want to bring something else up. Here are the opening credits for the first three seasons of Big Love:

Light-hearted. Fun. They're compelling and interesting, but they simply depict the four spouses getting along and skating around, then looking for each other in a sea of white, then sitting down for a group dinner. All set to the Beach Boys. Now, contrast that intro with this one, new in Season 4:

Dark. Desperate. And everyone is falling. Perhaps apart and away from one another. The symbolism is a little blatant, but I really appreciate the new intro; its tonal shift directly reflects that of the show itself. This is no longer a fun little series about the wacky adventures of a polygamist family, but one about isolation, regret, and drifting away from the life and people you've known and loved. Pretty good stuff!