🎬 The Setup

Big Love ran on HBO from 2006 to 2011, five seasons, 53 episodes. Created by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman attached as executive producers from the jump. It premiered directly after the season-six opener of The Sopranos, which gave it the biggest possible launching pad in prestige television at the time, and it mostly lived up to the handover.

The premise is a risk that shouldn't have worked on paper. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) is a hardware-store businessman in suburban Salt Lake City with three wives, seven children and a secret. He is a practicing polygamist who follows the Principle, a fundamentalist Mormon doctrine rejected by the mainstream LDS Church since 1890. His three houses share a single suburban back garden. His wives, Barb, Nicki and Margene, rotate nights according to a schedule pinned up in the kitchen. His children juggle school runs with the constant fear that the wrong neighbour might ask the wrong question.

That is the whole conceit and it is more than enough to keep five seasons running.

🎭 The Ensemble

Paxton anchors the show as Bill, and it is the performance of his career. He plays a man who genuinely believes he is called to live the Principle and who also wants to win a state senate seat, run a chain of home-improvement stores and keep his family from tearing itself apart. The contradictions pile up and Paxton lets them. You can see him calculating in real time, working out whether the lie he is about to tell is worth the one he told yesterday.

Jeanne Tripplehorn as Barb, the first wife, is the moral centre of the show. She was raised LDS, she is the one who agreed to bring the other two in, and she spends most of five seasons wondering whether she made a catastrophic mistake. Tripplehorn plays her with a quiet devastation that does not ask for your sympathy and therefore gets it.

Chloë Sevigny as Nicolette Grant Henrickson, second wife, is the engine that makes the show dangerous. Nicki is the daughter of Roman Grant, the self-styled prophet of the Juniper Creek compound, and she grew up inside the thing the Henricksons are trying to distance themselves from. She wears prairie dresses in the Salt Lake suburbs and acts as if the rest of the world is the problem. Sevigny won a Golden Globe for it in 2010 and she earned it.

Ginnifer Goodwin as Margene, the third and youngest wife, is the wild card. Margene married into the family in her early twenties on half an understanding of what she was signing up for, and the show uses her to ask what happens when someone realises they built their life on a rough sketch.

Surrounding them is one of the finest supporting ensembles HBO ever assembled. Harry Dean Stanton as Roman Grant, patriarch of Juniper Creek, radiates a soft-spoken menace that turns every scene into a standoff. Grace Zabriskie as Lois Henrickson, Bill's mother, is terrifying in an entirely different register. Bruce Dern as Frank Henrickson, Bill's cast-off father, is her equal and her nemesis. Mary Kay Place, Amanda Seyfried as the teenage daughter Sarah, Douglas Smith as son Ben, Shawn Doyle, Anne Dudek, Daveigh Chase, Joel McKinnon Miller and a briefly memorable Aaron Paul fill out a compound and a neighbourhood that feel entirely lived in.

Big Love

About This Show

🎬 The Setup

🎭 The Ensemble

Cast & Crew

🧠 What It Is Really About

🎨 Style and Texture

📈 Reception and Legacy

🏆 Why It Holds Up