Unless you’ve actually been buried in the Meadowlands for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard that a certain North Jersey family will be returning to HBO this Sunday.
What you may not know is that they’ll be followed by another family, who, like Tony and Carmela Soprano, blend in fairly easily in their suburban neighborhood, but like the troubled mob boss and his relatives, are sitting on some sizable secrets.
The big secret in HBO’s “Big Love,” though, isn’t about what ever happened to that nice girl Carmela’s nephew Christopher was planning to marry, or why “Big Pussy” never comes around anymore.
It’s about the fact that the back yard of the house Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) shares with his wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and their children extends seamlessly into the yards of the two houses adjoining it, where Bill lives with his two other wives, Nikki (Chloe Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), and the children he has with them.
Yes, we’re talking big love.
Utah’s trailer-park polygamy cults have been ratings fodder for network news magazines for years, but just as “The Sopranos” made the Mafia more relatable by focusing on an upper-middle-class suburban family with a McMansion and college-bound children, “Big Love’s” plopped its polygamists right on the edge of Salt Lake City, on a suburban street that might easily be a block or two from “Desperate Housewives’ ” Wisteria Lane, and made its “patriarch” the hard-working owner of a growing home-improvement store chain (named – get it? – Home Plus).
And just as some Italians get sensitive about being depicted as mobsters, the Mormon church would rather not be associated with polygamy, the practice of plural marriage having been officially banned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1890.
That distinction could be lost on some fans of “The Sopranos,” who are likely to be more immediately drawn into Bill Henrickson’s day-to-day difficulties keeping three women financially and physically satisfied – let’s just say the second episode’s titled “Viagra Blue” – than they are by the spiritual journey that’s brought him three wives and seven children, or his complicated relations with his parents (Grace Zabriskie and Bruce Dern) and the polygamy cult in which he grew up.
Which is fine. Some people watch “The Sopranos” only for the whacking, after all. And OK, maybe the ziti.
But if you’ve been mourning the coming loss of that series because you’ll miss what David Chase’s mob story’s had to say about marriage, family and middle-aged angst, then you’ll definitely want to stick around as “Big Love” evolves from its sex-centered beginnings to a sometimes funny, frequently heartbreaking portrait of a marriage that may not be as different as it first seems.
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BIG LOVE
10 p.m. Sunday
HBO
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