I'm Watching: Big Love

My girlfriend and I went to the local library and borrowed the first two seasons of the HBO series Big Love on DVD. We've been watching them at a fairly quick pace, and we're about halfway through the second season now. For those of you who've seen more of it NO SPOILERS in the comments please.

In any event, the show follows the family of Bill Hendrickson, a polygamist from Utah. Bill was booted off his family's compound when he was 14. After living on the streets for a while, Bill eventually became successful and got married to his first wife Barb. Years later, when Barb was sick and nearly died Bill also married Barb's nurse Nicki who lived at the polygamist compound. Three years before the time of the first episode Bill married Margene, his newest and youngest wife. Bill bought three houses next door to each other, one for Barb, one for Nicki and one for Margene. Bill spends time in the three houses according to a set schedule.

Drama unfolds as this strange family struggles to fit in with a world that they have to hide their true relationships from. Bill tries to run his hardware-store business and the wives and children try to lead as normal lives as possible. Bill's family and Nicki's family live back at the polygamist compound, a quaint pastoral community rife with corruption and abuse. The protagonist family tries to hold on to their bonds to the compound while not being sucked into the nasty side of things there.

I can't stop watching Big Love with horrible fascination. The writing is excellent and the dialogue crisp and engaging, but that's not the only reason to watch. Some of the time you want to watch with revulsion (especially when the scenes show life inside the compound) but mostly you just want this family to succeed at trying to make their bizarre lives as normal as they can be.

Also, as normal as the Hendrickson's life seems compared to life inside the compound, the institution of polygamy as practiced by these folks still revolves around male ownership of women. The relationships among the sister-wives are sincere and really seem to work well for the characters in many scenes. Yet all of the true authority stays with Bill. He is free to date and look for additional wives but of course the same is not true for the women. Bill gets three sexual relationships at the same time, but the wives have no similar perk.

It occurres to my girlfriend that these folks are trying to destroy the communities that might actually be accepting of them. If they just moved to San Fransisco and said, I'm married to this woman but I also consider this woman and this woman my wife nobody would harass them about it. But the reality of polygamy as practiced by LDS splinter groups in this country nowadays is scary and evil.