BIG LOVE!! HITCHCOCK!! DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH!! Herc's Season-Box DVD Vault!!

I am – Hercules!!

All through the first season of HBO’s perfectly watchable bigamy drama “Big Love,” I was thinking this: If Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton) is so determined to ruin son-in-law and closeted-bigamist home-improvement czar Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), why not just out Bill as a bigamist? I figured Roman couldn’t out Bill for some hidden reason Roman knew and Bill knew but viewers didn’t know yet. Turns out there was no reason. Roman apparently chose to out Bill when he did because it gave “Big Love’s” producers a big moment on which to end the series’ first season. Bah! But still! For all “Big Love’s” logical and dramatic flaws, it still had enough “real stuff” to make for a fascinating look at all the wackiness going on out there in Utah, likely this nation’s reddest state. And wacky it is. Mormons, who apparently do not look kindly upon caffeine and alcohol, pretty much run Utah. So in “Big Love” the wilder Mormon teens have to get loaded on bottles of cough syrup. In real life, Mormonism was founded by a notorious polygamist, a guy named Joseph Smith (1805-1844). Smith said his practice of polygamy was God’s idea. As I understand it, Smith said if he didn’t marry all of his 30-odd wives simultaneously, God would kill him. (As it turned out The Almighty was the least of Smith’s worries; he was shot to death in Illinois by a huge mob of anti-Mormon activists.) So bigamy became all the rage among the Mormons. Under the direction of church president Brigham Young (1801-1877), Orson Pratt in 1852 publicly announced that the church was practicing plural marriage under commandment of God. (A ballsy move; this was just four years after Mexico ceded to the U.S. the Great Salt Valley on which the Mormons had settled.) Now get this. Today, Mormons disdain polygamy! They banned the practice in 1890. This is presumably because the nation’s (far more populous) monogamist Christians, who probably thought Brigham Young was a maniac, pressured the U.S government to outlaw polygamy via the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. But many a diehard polygamist Mormon fundamentalist, rather understandably, called bullshit. Was the U.S. government now a higher authority than God Himself? They split from the church and segregated themselves from monogamist society. These fundamentalists are something akin to the fundamentalist sect that produced both Roman Grant and Bill Henricksen. Anyone straddling that line between the Fundamentaist Mormanism and the government-approved “real” Mormonism is going to lead a complicated life, and probably an interesting one. “Big Love” has many interesting characters. Chief among these is Roman, the fundamentalist uberbigwig with a penchant for new teen wives younger than his own grandchildren. Fascinating also is Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase), Roman’s latest teen fiancée, a snotty brat who enjoys the prestige afforded by Roman’s interest but may secretly hope to use showbiz to flee Utah before the repulsive and elderly Roman can lay a paw on her. Bill’s first wife, Barb (the wonderful Jeanne Tripplehorn, "The Firm"), grew up a regular Republican Mormon, but got sucked into Bill’s weirder world via a cancer scare. The management skills fostered by her teaching background serve her well in her post-monogamy life. Bill’s second wife, Roman’s daughter Nicki (the wonderful Chloe Sevigny, "Boys Don't Cry"), was introduced as a major flake with a credit-card addiction, but as the series wore on we learned she was likeably steely and resourceful, and fearless in the face of adversity – whether that adversity be Roman’s menacing thug of a son (her own half-brother) or Barb’s judgmental sister. Bill’s third and youngest wife, Margene (the wonderful Ginnifer Goodwin, "Walk the Line"), fascinates in part because she remained such an enigma even after the first season ended. Bill met her while she was working in his store, but her background seems to be neither Mormon nor Mormon fundamentalist, and she seemed at one point to be contemplative of throwing in with the monogamists across the street. So was it just Bill’s good looks that lured her into her strange circumstances, or is there more to it? Fans of “Veronica Mars” might be willing to check out the series just for the young-adult supporting cast, which features in recurring roles Amanda Seyfried (Lilly Kane), Tina Majorino (Mac Mackenzie) and Kyle Gallner (Beaver Casablancas). (“Waterworld” fans will remember that a much shorter Majorino worked with Tripplehorn 11 years ago as well.) Extras include cast-creator commentaries on three of he 12 episodes, plus a documentary on the series’ memorable and partially icebound title sequence.
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