Why Big Love does not measure up against The Sopranos

To see two episodes of "Big Love" is to see about 1.5 too many. Episode seen last night, about Bill Hendrickson's announcement of his run for State Senate, complete with about 30 other plot complications including cult happenings, kidnappings, marriages, oedipal strife, border smuggling, meth on Indian reservations, legal wranglings, INS raids, shall I go on?, this list tells you all you need to know about the series. Interesting at times, but jammed with improbable plot elements to the point where you don't understand the characters, much less believe in them. Contrast this with the HBO gold standard, The Sopranos. One of the many things that made that series so great was that it took on a unique culture and both played up the stereotypes and blasted through them. Life in a mob family was in some way completely different from anything you could imagine and in other ways was just like an ordinary American family, with the typical teenage angst, marital squabbles, family jeolousies, and so on. We believed in the more outlandish aspects of the Sopranos way of life because the story was so well grounded in a life we know and understand. In fact, we were equally interested in both aspects of the Sopranos life, and they two - violent and immoral versus ordinary suburban America - played off one another very effectively: could others really treat the Sopranos as an ordinary family? Did they try? Big Love is the opposite - it's a totally whacked out family, and our interest in the series, such as it is, lives or dies totally on the degree of our interest in the exotic. Mine is close to nil.