Big Love: Season 1

Last Christmas, my future in-laws gave me all five seasons of Big Love, one of their favorite shows, on DVD. I'm embarrassed that it took me a whole year just to watch the first season, but here I am now with the first twelve of fifty-three episodes in the books. I'll say this for the series - it's very inviting and watchable. HBO has produced plenty of deeper and more important shows than Big Love, but several of those have required a ton of up-front effort on the viewer's end for full appreciation. The Wire is my favorite show of all time, and it took two and a half seasons - half the damn series - for me to even understand what its big picture was. Deadwood was a great show, but I'm dying to re-watch it because I know I missed all kinds of stuff my first time through. Carnivàle? Forget it; I was lost by the second episode and already unwilling to turn back for clarity's sake. Big Love isn't a thematically deep show and it can't possibly go down in television history as being anything important, so to speak, but it sure is an easy show to watch.

The premise is pretty simple. A plural family in Utah (read: one guy, three wives) struggles both collectively and as individuals in various conflicts with their polygamy-loving church, society's judgment, and most often of all one another. The first half of the season served as little more than an extended introduction to the characters and their complicated relationships. Patriarch Bill is a businessman with the stressful self-imposed task of supporting three families; first wife Barb is a super-mom and the anchor of the family, but she's grown fairly disenfranchised by her radical sect of Mormonism and embraces her 21st century opportunities; second wife Nikki is the most devoutly religious one in the family, but also the shadiest, often scheming against her husband and her sister-wives or at the very least complaining about their behavior; and Margie is the third wife, just twenty-one years old and already a mother of two, still trying to figure out her place in the polygamous family. I was impressed by how interesting the series was capable of making rather mundane tasks simply by putting the "three wives" spin on things like going to the grocery store, sharing cars, and arguing about wills. The three wives were easily the most entertaining part of the show; I really never gave two shits what Bill was doing, either at work or in church, and mostly just wanted to see the dramedy of the family's unique living situation. Again, not the deepest show, but pretty easy to just sit and watch.

There are four more seasons, and I have to imagine the series will grow more plot-driven in time, but this first season was successful based on its characters and situation-crafting in general.