Given HBO's penchant for tackling offbeat families (mobsters, morticians), it was probably only a matter of time before they got around to polygamists, which they do on the new series Big Love (Sundays, 10 p.m.). The show follows suburban dad Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), who looks like your average upper-middle-class guy: He owns a small chain of home-improvement stores in the Salt Lake City area, has been married for 16 years to Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and has three children. The difference is that, unbeknownst to all but his closest friends and family, Bill also has two other wives: the sullen, manipulative Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), the daughter of fundamentalist polygamy compound leader Roman (Harry Dean Stanton), and the naïve Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), who's barely older than Bill and Barb's eldest child.
The families (including two children each for Nicki and Margene) live in adjoining houses but conceal their true nature from the neighbors. They straddle two worlds: rejecting the strong-arm tactics of Roman's cult-like compound (modeled on the polygamists' community of Colorado City, Arizona) for a life more engaged with the outside world while still staying away from the mainstream Mormon church, which sees polygamy as a threat to its legitimacy.
More than anything, what you learn from Big Love is that polygamists have a lot of sex. Bill pops Viagra so that he can please all three of his wives, and his coworker and fellow polygamist urges him to take on a fourth. Beyond his extra-active sex life, though, Bill is a lot like your average family man, and that's what makes Big Love work so well. By positioning the Henricksons outside of both the scary cult and the mainstream Mormons, the show emphasizes the ways that they are just like everyone else. They bicker about typical family stuff and deal with pressures at work and at home, but deep down they really love each other. "We are all here by choice," Barb says in the show's pilot, and it's that mantra that makes Big Love not only a rich family drama, but also a pretty good argument for the acceptance of this non-creepy sort of polygamy.
Like NBC's short-lived Book of Daniel, Big Love sometimes pushes a little too hard to be shocking, but it's buoyed by stellar acting, especially from Tripplehorn as the clan's sometimes reluctant matriarch. HBO fans may have trouble adjusting to a show with no violence and very little swearing or nudity (it's about Mormons, after all), but if Big Love gets a chance to build an audience, it could very well be the channel's next big thing.
Back on the networks, it's business as usual, with three unremarkable new sitcoms making their bows this week. CBS continues its near-monopoly on the tired, predictable, traditional sitcom with The New Adventures of Old Christine (Mondays, 9:30 p.m.; premieres March 13 at 8:30 p.m.), starring Seinfeld alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a divorced mother. There's no need to worry that the show will break the Seinfeld curse, which has felled shows by Jason Alexander and Michael Richards. Christine is so trite that you have to wonder if the writers just exhumed scripts from old sitcoms, changed the character names, added a few risqué references and let the cameras roll.
Slightly less rickety are Fox's Free Ride (Sundays, 9:30 p.m.) and The Loop (Thursdays, 8:30 p.m.; premieres March 15 at 9:30 p.m.), which nevertheless suffer from remarkably similar premises. On Free Ride (which had a sneak preview last week), a recent college grad moves back to his Midwestern hometown to figure out what to do with his life. On The Loop, a recent college grad moves to Chicago to work a corporate job and figure out what to do with his life. Both have hard-partying comrades and long-standing crushes on attached women, and the lead actors even look similar. With its semi-improvised structure, Free Ride is a little more entertaining, but both shows end up fairly uninspired.