‘Big Love’: One long middle

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Has anyone else noticed that the episodic plotting of HBO’s dramatic series has become increasingly arbitrary in recent years? Back in its more conventional days, they aired instantly identifiable episodes – you know, ones with beginnings, middles and ends. There was the ‘Sopranos’ where Tony takes Meadow to college, for instance. Or the ‘Sex and the City’ where Carrie gets dumped by Post-It note.

Nowadays, the preferred mode for HBO storytelling can be seen on ‘Big Love,’ which has aired three episodes of its second season so far. But instead of playing like semi-self-contained installments of a greater whole, they feel more like the first three hours of a 12-hour movie, one that keeps getting rudely interrupted by another week of my own life.

Serialization may be all the rage with the rise of TV on DVD and other formats, but with ‘Big Love’ the cable network seems intent on wiping out the time-tested three-act structure altogether in favor of a tangled, sprawling kind of storytelling. On “Big Love,” events don’t happen; they develop. It may play great in marathon sessions, but for the weekly viewer it’s an exercise in slow torture. It’s especially bad when the show in question is as compulsively watchable as ‘Big Love.’

Monday night brought further trouble for the Henrickson clan, which has adopted a bunker mentality this season, the result of their polygamist lifestyle being revealed to the world at large. And they have good reason to be wary. Bill (Bill Paxton) and Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) attended a family reunion at Juniper Creek and barely avoided a raid by the state police. Meanwhile, Nicki’s unstable brother Alby (Matt Ross) appears headed for a major meltdown after being instructed to drop the investigation into his own poisoning.

If there was one thing Bill’s family and the semi-crazed Juniper Creekers led by Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) could agree on was that the media’s persecution of polygamists was grossly unfair and misinformed.

“All the good ones are closeted,” lamented one of Barb’s polygamist friends. “Oh, that term,” she moaned.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Near-constant media reports of crackdowns on polygamist compounds accompany the action this season like a drumbeat of doom. But lest we get too judgmental of these God-fearing hedonists, the shows creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, have slyly placed the whole lot of them in the same political boat as gay couples, fighting the federal government to be recognized. It’s a prospect that would surely have Barb and company gasping in shock and drawing the blinds if it were ever pointed out to them.

The sudden change in Bill’s home life has been a bit of a head-scratcher so far this year. Who would have thought that when Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) ran into trouble, she’d turn to Nicki, of all people? And that Nicki, who last season was so aggressively endearing as the shrewishly unhappy middle wife, would suddenly become a font of good advice for her younger sister wife.

Even taking into account Barb’s unhappy relationship with her own sister and the children’s sexual temptations, the Henrickson house runs the risk of becoming almost Cleaver-like in its tranquility. So it came as a relief in the closing moments of “Reunion” that an even bigger troublemaker than Nicki, Roman’s underage wife, Rhonda, snuck out of the Prophet’s clutches and returned -- uninvited -- to the Henrickson house.

Here’s hoping Rhonda’s early potential as a great manipulator gets fulfilled this year. She’s played by Daveigh Chase, an actress who first came to wide attention crawling out of a TV set in the 200X horror hit, “The Ring.” No wonder the intensely ambitious Rhonda gives me the creeps. The wily look she flashed as she hugged Barb in the episode’s closing moments was enough to send chills down the back.

It may not have been a cliffhanger as powerful as “Lost” or “24,” but as an ending for HBO, it was more than good enough.

-- Patrick Day