‘Big Love’ looks at the politics of polygamy

HBO has treated the remarkable second season of its polygamist show “Big Love” like a radiant but overlooked sister-wife, paying more promotional attention to the conclusion of “The Sopranos” and the launching of “John from Cincinnati,” a bombastic series the network ended up canceling last week.

“Big Love,” which moved back to Sunday nights to replace “John,” is about two subjects that TV never finds sexy -- religion and family, in the uncynical sense. Inside the Henrickson home, there is no separation of church and state; there’s a president and his Cabinet of women, with lobbying, scheming and back-channel deal-making in the corridors of three houses conjoined under a shared God.

The idea that God is closely watching the Henricksons (Bill, wife No. 1 Barb, wife No. 2 Nicki and wife No. 3 Margene) bolsters the titillation of the white lies and manipulations they perpetrate on one another, not to mention the forbidden earthly sins they can hardly resist.

“Big Love” began as a semi-humorous show about a semi-closeted Mormon entrepreneur trying to juggle three wives, three families, three mortgages and one wholesome American superstore called Home Plus. Social conservatives paradoxically in an open marriage, the Henricksons pray with a conviction TV usually can’t stomach. Of course, God is malleable on “Big Love,” producing cultish terrorists and capitalist oligarchs. The Henricksons more honestly struggle with the contradictions between the lifestyle their faith has produced and a world that considers it deviant. And for Bill (Bill Paxton), there’s a heaping tablespoon of self-denial -- namely, the self he left behind at Juniper Creek, the Holy Roller compound from which he was expelled at 14.

As with the closeted pot dealer Nancy Botwin on Showtime’s broader suburban satire “Weeds,” the tease in Season 1 of “Big Love” was whether the Henricksons would be outed as polygamists on their street or in the aisles of Home Plus and whether Bill could funnel cash from the compound while keeping the compound crazies from showing up in his driveway.

All the threats remain in Season 2, but the show has moved on to something more interesting unfolding inside the Henrickson home: the awakening of the women, now exerting checks and balances on Bill’s authority. Here’s where the show has gotten truly rich, by making Bill the outsider, God-like in reputation only, as when he asked for a seventh day of rest and the sister-wives banded together to withhold sex altogether.

As head of state, Bill tends to act unilaterally, then lobby for his wives’ support as if the decision were in play. Take Weber Gaming, the video gaming distributorship he bought this season without soliciting the wives’ input. Like a Washington lobbyist, Bill broached the topic with Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) as they hit balls at a driving range. On Weber Gaming, it came to pass, Barb, Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) were split but only so far as Bill’s actions conflicted with their own agendas -- Barb’s need to be the top dog and Nicki’s compulsion to divide and conquer and Margene’s desire, as the youngest wife and No. 3, to feel like something other than Bill’s “plaything.”

“Oh, Bill,” Margene said of his purchase of Weber Gaming, “just tell me what you want me to think about it.” It was only when Barb insisted they put the matter to a vote that Margene had a political awakening: She’d become Ohio. “I don’t want this decision to divide us,” Bill said, long after it already had.

The sister-wives’ emergence -- sometimes united, sometimes at war -- has made “Big Love” also a political satire such as we haven’t seen since Archie Bunker was trying to keep his household’s gender roles frozen in the 1950s on “All in the Family.”

It might sound perverse to say, but one reason the family sitcom is all but extinct now is that the networks gave up on the old, credulous idea of a dysfunctional dictatorship. “Arrested Development,” the last of the celebrated family sitcoms, seemed to put a period on that long epoch; it was a show on which nobody was the father or the mother -- the family unit portrayed as a giant swill of ego-need and baggage.

On “Big Love,” the dictator doesn’t see he’s facing a bloodless coup. The wives are usually seen at home, cleaning or cooking, one eye barely on the kids. But within this antiquated patriarchal arrangement, they resonate as modern and powerful.

A week ago, Bill (acting unilaterally again) took Margene as his “public wife” to a Nevada gaming convention. “How could she think that she could fill your shoes?” protested Nicki, Iago to Barb’s Othello. “She doesn’t have any of that uppity thing that you have that represented us so well in public.” In Nevada, of course, Bill came to need Barb as his ambassador to the secular world. But he got neither wife in bed, because Barb forced him to sleep alone while she shared the honeymoon suite with Margene.

“Remember, Bill, there’s a patriarch above you,” Barb had said, knowing she couldn’t hold up the purchase of Weber Gaming. “He’s called Our Heavenly Father, and I don’t think he looks too kindly on you putting your wives and family in bed with gangsters, guns and gambling.”

Increasingly, the women realize they outnumber Bill three sister-wives to one vulnerable patriarch. The rock-solid foundation of faith and family makes “Big Love” oddly refreshing. But what’s truly fun is watching these outré-modern women -- neck-deep in kids, car pools and God, cellphones attached to their waists -- discover the intoxicating power of the filibuster.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘Big Love’

Where: HBO

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17)