Big Love

Overview

The show was co-created by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, who also served as executive producers. Olsen and Scheffer spent almost three years researching the premise of the show, with the intent of creating a fair, non-judgmental portrayal of polygamy in America.

Music

The theme song for the final two seasons of the series was "Home", by the band Engineers. During the first three seasons, "God Only Knows", by The Beach Boys, played during the opening titles. The musical score for the series was composed by Anton Sanko. Mark Mothersbaugh composed music for the first season, while David Byrne was in charge of music during the second season.

Leading cast

Henrickson family and friends

Extended Henrickson family

Dutton family

Grant family

Bill's business partners and associates

Recurring

Episodes

The series revolves around Bill Henrickson, his three wives (Barb, first/legal wife; Nicki, second wife; and Margene, third wife) and their (combined) nine children. Henrickson lives with his family in three neighboring houses in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Of her character, Chloë Sevigny says, "There is definitely a power struggle that goes on between the wives."

United Effort Brotherhood

The show's fictional fundamentalist group, the "United Effort Brotherhood," or UEB, has characteristics similar to the historic "United Effort Plan" established by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and taken over by the state in 2005. The FLDS is one of the most prolific and well-known polygamist groups and identifies as the legitimate successor of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which officially discontinued polygamy in 1890. Creators Olsen and Scheffer included a drive through the twin FLDS towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, as part of their research for the show. Like the FLDS, the UEB has built its own temple on its Kansas compound. The raid on Juniper Creek is reminiscent of the Short Creek raid, an historic event in 1953 where Arizona state police and National Guard troops took action against polygamists in Colorado City. Many of the businesses owned by the 'UEB' are similar to businesses owned by the Latter Day Church of Christ (aka the Kingston Clan), another Mormon fundamentalist church. The concept for the cable show was influenced by a 2003 article published in Utah on the Darger family, who are Independent Fundamentalist Mormons.

Production and crew

Although set in Utah, the series was primarily filmed at the Santa Clarita Studios in Valencia, California. The location used for filming "Henrickson's Home Plus" scenes was The All American Home Center in Downey, California.

The outside scenes of the three homes that Bill owns were filmed on location on Shady Lane, in the small town of Fillmore, California.

The mall scenes from season one were filmed in the Fox Hills Mall, in Culver City, California. Other exterior shots were filmed in Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah and Sandy, Utah, as well as northeast Los Angeles, California.

The head writers for the series are the co-creators: Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer. The writing staff includes Patricia Breen, Dustin Lance Black, Doug Jung, Eileen Myers, Jennifer Schuur, Doug Stockstill, Jeanette Collin, Mimi Friedman, and Julia Cho.

Directors of the series include Jim McKay, Adam Davidson, Rodrigo Garcia, Charles McDougall, Sarah Pia Anderson, Dan Attias, Burr Steers, Michael Spiller, Alan Taylor, John Strickland, Mary Harron, Steve Shill, Julian Farino, Michael Lehmann, and Alan Poul (former executive producer of Six Feet Under).

The show's producers are Alexa Junge, Ann Holm, Ron Binkowski, Bernadette Caulfield, Jeanette Collins, Mimi Friedman, Shane Keller, David Knoller, Mark V. Olsen, Will Scheffer, Gary Goetzman, and Tom Hanks.

Soundtrack

David Byrne recorded a complete soundtrack to the second season, released as Big Love: Hymnal on August 19, 2008. The theme song to the series from Seasons 1 through 3 was The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows". As of Season 4, the song "Home", performed by the British band Engineers, was adopted as the show's theme song along with a new title sequence. "God Only Knows" was covered by Natalie Maines for the series finale.

Critical reception

Review aggregate Metacritic indicated positive critical response for all five seasons. The average scores for the first through fourth seasons were 72/100, 71/100, 79/100, and 70/100, indicating "generally favorable reviews." The fifth and final season received an average score of 85/100, or "universal acclaim".

Upon its debut, reaction to the series was mixed-to-positive. Initial raves came from publications such as Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and New York Daily News -- James Poniewozik described it as a "first-rate drama" and Dorothy Rabinowitz said it was "seriously compelling." Publications such as Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Variety, the Boston Globe, and the Hollywood Reporter were all positive as well. Notable detractors included Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times, who said it ultimately "didn't convince"; Doug Elfman of the Chicago Sun-Times, who felt its quality didn't match its concept; and John Leonard of New York Magazine, describing it as "more soapy than salacious."

By the second season, critical reception warmed. Maureen Ryan of The Huffington Post and noted critic Alan Sepinwall remained ambivalent towards the show; otherwise critics were uniformly positive. In particular, several critics noted improvements from season one. Gillian Flynn of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "Big Love has dropped the last vestiges of its ostentatious quirkiness and fashioned itself into a rich and grounded family drama," and Diane Werts of Newsday said that "'Big Love' does more this year than you might expect, and more richly, more provocatively, more dramatically and amusingly, too." The second season was cited among the best shows of 2007 by numerous publications, including PopMatters, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and NPR.

Season three vaulted Big Love to universal critical acclaim. Notably, Tim Stack of Entertainment Weekly gave the season's early episodes an 'A' grade, and Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times said, "If there's a better written, better acted, more originally conceived show on television, I defy you to name it." After two years of popping up spottily on critics' 'Best Of' lists, season three was recognized as one of the top seasons of television from 2009. In aggregating Top 10 lists from every major television critic, Metacritic reported that 10 critics had cited the series, tying for the eighth-most mentions (and, in particular, Big Love ranked third on that list among series in their third season or later).

Though only its first three seasons aired in the 2000s (decade), multiple critics cited Big Love as one of the best series of the decade. They include the Huffington Post, Ain't It Cool News and The A.V. Club, who wrote "Big Love has proved to be one of the most ... earnest studies of religion and morality ever to air on television."

Returning in 2010, Big Love was met with mixed critical response for a shorter fourth season. General consensus dictated that the series was focused too much on plot, with character development suffering as a result. The Washington Post identified a lack of energy in the actors, looking "alternately confused and pooped, empty shells of the characters they used to play". Putting it into perspective, Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, "In this new season the show is spinning off into too many directions. None, taken individually, is terrible, but altogether these myriad plots create a lack of focus." The A.V. Club, which a year earlier had cited the drama as one of the previous decade's top 20 shows, described the fourth season after its finale as "The season that virtually obliterated Big Love's dramatic credibility."

When the series returned for its fifth and final season the next year, critical reaction was extremely enthusiastic. Big Love received the best early reviews of its entire run. Mary McNamara wrote, "Big Love quickly reclaims its astonishing ability to balance the insightful and the absurd, hilarity and heartbreak and the personal with the political." Similar raves came from Nancy DeWolf Smith of the Wall Street Journal, who said the final season was "mesmerizing", and the New York Post, which awarded the final season a perfect four out of four stars. Overall, the final season of Big Love tied as the fourth-best reviewed returning show of 2011, trailing only Breaking Bad, Louie and the animated comedy Archer. It was the tenth-best reviewed scripted series of the year overall.

Response to the series finale, "When Men and Mountains Meet," was passionate among top publications. Jace Lacob of the Daily Beast called it the "perfect way to close out this series" and described his reaction to it as "emotional". James Poniewozik wrote for Time Magazine that "In the end ... Big Love came back full circle to the core relationships ... We closed on a moving if messy note for a moving if messy series." Mary McNamara, of the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "a perfect finish to an astonishingly ambitious show that often careened through genre, narrative structure and believability like they were false walls on a stage". In her rumination on the finale, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times noted that "[Big Love] was always at its most compelling as an indictment of the mindless spiritual avidity and the bizarre displays of self-exoneration that can go on in the name of faith," and celebrated the finale for committing to that theme. She also wrote that the series had "achieved the resonance of [HBO's] other heralded series." Writing for TV Squad, Dr. Ryan Vaughn was less enthusiastic about the finale but said, "I'm not going to let a great series be sullied with a mediocre finale." Finally, The A.V. Club awarded the series finale, and the series as a whole, a B+, writing that its first three seasons in particular qualified as "remarkable television."

LDS Church response

In March 2006, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) issued a public statement citing concerns over the program's depiction of abuse, polygamy, use of stereotypes, and television's depiction of moral and civic values in general. Among other things, the church stated, "Despite its popularity with some, much of today's television entertainment shows an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, coarse humor and foul language. Big Love, like so much other television programming, is essentially lazy and indulgent entertainment that does nothing for our society and will never nourish great minds." In March 2009, the LDS Church stated that HBO's writers, producers, and executives were displaying insensitivity to church members by choosing to display simulated segments of the LDS Church's Endowment ceremony in an episode of Big Love. The LDS Church also stated that the show had continued to blur the distinction between the LDS Church and "the show's fictional non-Mormon characters".

Academia

Since its premiere, Big Love has been the subject of several seminal studies in the humanities and social sciences.

Dr. Cheryl Hanna explored "the problem of categorical exclusions to the consent doctrine in private intimate relationships" through the lens of Big Love, specifically citing its "beautifully explored" tensions between individual autonomy and state interests. In her conclusion, she wrote "the future of feminist legal theory depends on its ability to remain ambivalent about the tensions presented in the consent doctrine as applied to contexts such as polygamy, prostitution, sadomasochistic sex, obscenity, and domestic violence. Big Love seeks to persuade us to accept ambivalence and to be open to changing our minds because of the complicated nature of women's (and men's) lives; feminist legal theory ought to persuade us to do the same."

For the Columbia Law Review, Dr. Adrienne D. Davis assessed legal debates surrounding polygamy after the premiere of Big Love and how it was being likened to same-sex marriage. She wrote, "The highly acclaimed hit series self-consciously invites viewers to consider analogies between same-sex and polygamous families. In the show's much-anticipated second season, the invitation became more pointed and persistent, with intermittent references to 'coming out,' 'closeted families,' and 'the state' as repressively surveilling nonconforming 'big love.'" However, she claimed that Hollywood and television critics' desire to interpret the polygamy in Big Love and beyond as representative of American "quirky families" was a miscue. Ultimately, she argues that the dichotomy presented by Big Love works when viewed in terms of "intimacy liberty, privacy, autonomy, and agency, or even an incipient constitutional respect for 'sexual minorities.'"; the very essence, as Davis notes and commends, of the series' themes.

Dr. Brenda Cossman examined Big Love closely in her study of "migrating marriages" for Law and Contemporary Problems. In addition to asserting that "Just as in Big Love, same-sex marriage is never more than one degree away of separation from polygamy," she found that the series adds crucial insight to the understanding of marriages that exist between legal and cultural recognition. As she explains, "These cases can be seen through the lens of ... Big Love, in which marriages are produced as the culturally real in the here and the now, even when legal recognition remains elusive." By exploring the movement seeking to culturally legitimize same-sex marriage, she concluded Big Love served as a most powerful, unique allegory: "Big Love plays on an even more decisive gap: polygamous marriages are not legal in Utah or anywhere else in the country. Yet the point and the poignancy of the show is to depict a 'real-life' family. Bill Hendrickson and his three wives struggle with all of the daily trials of contemporary family life: parenting, finances, intimacy, and sex. The sympathetic portrayal of their family is as culturally real, although it suffers by virtue of its nonlegal recognition."

Big Love was also studied as a part of Andrew Atkinson's study of HBO programs and the post-secular humanistic themes they elicit. In writing of Big Love, Atkinson too draws on the parallel between gay rights and polygamist rights illuminated by the series, but focuses more on the series' influential humanistic elements. In fact, he somewhat rebuffs earlier assertions made: "The attention that is paid to the minute details of Mormon ritual, theology, and historical disputes demonstrates that HBO's writers are uncomfortable with the supposed dichotomy that constructs homosexuality as by default areligious." Atkinson focuses on the ending, interpreting Barb's blessing of Bill as a "ritual innovation [that] indicates that FLDS Mormonism must shed the trappings of patriarchy if it wants to legitimate polygamy in a post-feminist society", and the fall of Alby, the closet homosexual, as a powerful interpretation of "the future theo-political and sexual tensions that Mormonism, and by extension, the broader American polity, will face as the post-secular matures". In concluding, Atkinson makes the case that Big Love and other HBO shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under "contribute to a fuller conception of humanity" than other forms of art and entertainment.

Awards and nominations

Series

Acting

Directing

Writing