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.

A thousand complications, none really believable: Big Love

"Big Love" is a totally preposterous series that is in spite of itself kind of fun to watch. This series - a very straight and ambitious Mormon businessman (Bill, running for Utah State Senate, part owner of an Indian casino) has three wives, each in a different age bracket and personality type. Lots of kids. Second wife's daughter has been raised in a Mormon cult, obviously modeled on the Texas cult broken up a few years back. She's freed, but her father is coming after her. Also some weird subplot about the cult founder who's a closet homosexual and therefore at war with himself. A thousand complications ensue, none really believable, but so what. We get the point, which is that, in an age of reality TV, when a realistic story about a polygamous Mormon family would fit right in, the only way to get extra edge is to push the plot elements way over the top, which Big Love does. As with most of the HBO series, the production values are strong, the acting is solid, the script is pretty sharp. It's just that - with so many things "on," why would you watch this one for more than an episode or two? I just don't find it compelling enough. It's a good thing it's been confined to the backwaters of HBO. I wonder how the Mormon community feels about it and deals with it. HBO was unafraid to take on stereotypes with The Sopranos, and I know the network took some heat on that, but taking on a religion is a tougher challenge, and I give them credit for believing in the show and not backing away because of the challenge. I remember a treatment I'd written about a rabbi and a cantor which was pretty roundly shunned, part of the reason being, we were told, the controversial nature of the material.