"BIG LOVE," LITTLE ENTERTAINMENT

April 7, 2006

One nice thing I can say about HBO's new Sunday night drama "Big Love": It reminds me weekly of how great a song "God Only Knows" is. But once the ethereal Beach Boys ditty fades out at the end of the otherwise cornball opening credits, it's all downhill from there.

"Big Love" is a sprawling family drama obviously meant to plug the hole left by the dearly departed "Six Feet Under." While that series used its morbid funeral home setting as the initial hook, "Big Love" has an even bolder concept - polygamy, the practice of marrying multiple wives.

At the center is Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), successful owner of a small chain of home improvement stores who comes home from work each day to three wives and seven children. The entire brood shares three neighboring houses and a combined backyard nestled snugly into suburbia. Though the series is set in Salt Lake City, HBO has been careful not to identify the characters as Mormons. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in 1890.) Bill was raised in Juniper Creek, a breakaway polygamy sect of religious folk that live the simple life in rural Utah. He has mostly left behind the eccentricities and primitive living of his parents, Lois and Frank, but holds onto many of their spiritual beliefs, including the right to settle down with more than one woman.

Four episodes in and the writers of "Big Love" have failed to do anything interesting with Bill, saddling him with the burden of fulfilling the many needs of three wives (I don't feel the least bit sorry for him) and pitting him against Roman Grant, father of Bill's second wife and the sinister leader of the Juniper Hill compound. Casting Paxton was also probably a mistake. The big-screen stalwart has always been better at playing wild (think back to his gung-ho turn as the marine grunt in "Aliens") than the stiff, conservative husband he's asked to portray here.

A little more interesting is the daily lives of the three wives, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin, especially when the fragile domestic paradise they've built starts to shake - a weekly occurrence. Tripplehorn's Barb is Bill's first wife, the de facto leader of Clan Henrickson who schedules what days Bill sleeps where and struggles to keep the family secret from the neighbors. Sevigny's Nicki is Roman's daughter and wife number two. She was raised in Juniper Creek, yet living on the outside, Nicki has developed a fondness for credit cards and has secretly rung up $60,000 in debt. (Which, by the way, nobody notices. How can you have $60,000 worth of new stuff without anyone cocking an eye?) Goodwin's Margene is the young, naive third wife and finds it difficult to juggle the many responsibilities of the massive family she's married into.

What any of them get out of sharing a husband has yet to be made clear four episodes into the show's run, and that vagueness is part of "Big Love"'s problem. After bearing three kids, Barb suffered some type of medical tragedy that prevented her from being able to have more. I assumed she agreed to Bill marrying again so he could conceive more children. However, the show's website says that the tragedy resulted in Juniper Hill sending Nicki to help out with Barb's kids, and eventually Nicki was invited to marry Bill. The difference is slight but should come from the show itself, not the accompanying website. Margene's motivations for joining the Henrickson brood remain unexplored. "Big Love" also spends some time with the teenaged children, but, so far, those bits have been disastrous, offering up pseudo-philosophical discussions on polygamy, religion, and whether or not to hit that kegger on Friday night.

The supporting cast is rock solid, especially the actors they got to take on the roles of Juniper Creek's denizens, including creepy-cool hall of famers like Harry Dean Stanton, who plays Roman, and Bruce Dern and Grace Zabriskie as Bill's parents. But even the satisfaction earned from watching those three play crazy isn't enough to recommend "Big Love." In the end, neither Bill nor any of his wives are all that likeable, so while the four of them may have plenty of love to share, I've got none of my own to give them.