'Big Love': Stumbling at the finish line

Let's call this the summer of HBO's head-scratching endings.  We started in June with Tony Soprano's sudden cut-to-black, then continued with the impenetrable conclusion of "John From Cincinnati," and now, just in time for Labor Day, we have the season finale of "Big Love," which was firing on all cylinders for most of its second season but came to a sputtering, half-hearted close.

The problem?  After a final episode filled with betrayals revealed, secrets unveiled, Bill's schemes against Alby thwarted and Roman jailed, the series somehow managed to steer itself back to something status quo.  Not exactly the sort of compelling stuff that leaves you breathless for more.

How, after episode and episode of Barb's increasing frustration with her place in the family did she come to Bill and reaffirm her stance alongside him?  This coming just moments after Bill made out with Ana (Branka Katic) in the family's pantry.  Barb was already upset with Bill over the revelation that Bill had dated Ana, and Ana's lustful reappearance would have been the perfect capper for Barb's ever-increasing list of grievances with polygamist living.  But no, instead the tryst went unnoted and Barb's increasing dissatisfaction seems to have been sated, at least until next season.  Our last shot of the show in 2007 was of the three sister wives, laughing and enjoying themselves as a family unit. Somehow that just didn't sit right.

All three wives developed as characters this year.  Margene began to learn how to assert herself, if only through the same methods a teenage daughter would assert herself.  Nicki revealed herself as a character to be pitied, admittedly suppressing her own desires and filling the void through gambling.  And then there was Barb, whose disapproving mother and sister have become a haunting specter over her home, and whose increasing inability to call the shots seemed to be the fatal bullet in her marriage. But despite Bill moving forward with Weber Gaming against her wishes, and Bill courting a possible fourth wife against her wishes, and Bill encouraging their son Ben to pursue a polygamist lifestyle against her wishes, she continued to stand by him without much complaint.  Will nothing make this woman pop?

In other developments, Bill's latest scheme to oust his arch-enemies Roman and Alby from the board of the UEB failed when Alby had his father arrested.  The inner-workings of the polygamist board members have been the least interesting aspect of "Big Love," and the events of the season-ender were no different.  The threatening phone conversations have been done to death.  Alby's intense stare has worn out its welcome, and Roman seems headed for an Uncle Junior-style slow fade-out.

After being shot in spectacular style by members of a rival polygamist family, Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) has spent the last few episodes in and out of a near-coma -- most of it induced by his son. But he finally came back to coherence in the season finale, only to be arrested.  In essence, Roman's place in the storyline didn't change one bit.  He started the episode absent and powerless, and it appears he'll be starting the third season in the same condition.  So why did we spend so much time with this feeble man who doesn't seem to be a threat to anyone anymore?

It seems as if the show's creators have grown just as bored with the constant power struggle between Bill and Roman, and seeking to change things up have brought Alby into power.  But Harry Dean Stanton is such an interesting actor, they can't rightly kick him off the show, so what do they do?  That seems like it will be one of the show's major challenges next year.

The other major challenge, and one that was made more difficult after the final episode, is how to make us believe that the Henricksons can continue to function as a family in a believable manner. How much more of this can Barb take?  For the show's sake, let's hope that it's not a lot.  Because in its second season, "Big Love" has discovered itself and successfully juggled the political and the domestic, the humorous and the melodramatic, and even, at times, the frightening.  When it's working as it should, it's dazzling to watch.  Let's hope the finale of the second season was just a minor stumble on the show's march to glory.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

After an embarrassing family confrontation in front of her disapproving mother and sister, it seemed certain that Barb would drop a bomb on Bill in the closing moments of last night's episode.  Finally, it appeared the harried first wife might try to leave Bill in an effort to save herself and her children from the inevitable alienation of the polygamist lifestyle.  That's how it seemed, anyway, as Barb took off her earrings in front of the mirror and glanced at the marital bed she shared every third night with Bill.  But the producers had another surprise in mind: rattlesnakes.  A bed full of slithering, hissing rattlesnakes.

Just like their marriage, the bed looked warm and inviting.  But just beneath the surface lay a literal snake pit of seething vipers.  Quite the symbolic image to conclude the penultimate episode of the season -- and not just in reference to the inherent difficulties of the polygamist lifestyle.  In its second season, "Big Love" has mastered its mix of domestic comedy and hard-edged melodrama, keeping everything unpredictable.  Just when you think the show is going to go for the heartstrings, it goes for the throat.

But who left those snakes in Bill and Barb's bed?  There are two prime suspects: Alby, the temporary leader of the polygamist group at Juniper Creek, and Hollis Greene, the creepier-than-thou polygamist leader on the run.  Both are circling Bill and his family like a couple of hungry tigers waiting to pounce, and it looks like the confrontation will come sooner rather than later.

To prime-time TV's all-time great mysteries -- a list which includes "How did no one figure out Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were really dudes?" and "How did the landlords never figure out John Ritter wasn't gay?" -- we can safely add one more: "How have the Henricksons been married this long and not have everyone know they're polygamists?"

Last season ended with Barb being outed in front of Utah's governor.  Their polygamist lifestyle was publicly mocked on a high-profile billboard.  And don't forget Barb's sticky encounters with the child welfare officers over her teenage in-law Rhonda.  The family has had so many close calls and awkwardly staged excuses, we have to start wondering if they're only fooling themselves when they try to put on a front.  Yet they continue to encounter people who aren't in on the secret, and the charade continues.

With his move into the casino gaming business, Bill has been saying that this is the family's chance to come out into the open a little more.  Last night, he tried his best.  And he succeeded to some degree: The poker-loving proprietors of some of the West's swingingest bars certainly seemed to get a kick out of Bill's clean-but-not-so-squeaky image.  But when he ran into old friends from his and Barb's church-going days, Bill screwed up again.  Stumbling on his own sense of secrecy, he introduced Margene as his secretary.

Although he may tout the high and noble goals of "the principle" at home, it's apparent that to the world at large, Bill's wives are nothing more than a way to help him maintain his comfortable lifestyle.  How else to explain his marriage to second wife Nicki, the daughter of Bill's nemesis Roman Grant, who loaned Bill the money to start his home supply store.  As Bill has worked to move away from Roman's influence in his business dealings, he's put his most politically motivated marriage off to the side.  When Barb refused to accompany Bill to the bar owners convention, he balked at inviting Nicki.  Poor Nicki, meanwhile, is becoming more and more alienated from not only her husband but her family back at Juniper Creek.  Her confrontation with her brother Alby, in which she let slip Bill's acquisition of the hotly pursued Weber Gaming, will only lead to a harsher form of conflict than we've seen before.  Is it possible the lethally violent Greene family will make a reappearance?

And what of Barb?  With each episode, the look of concern on her normally passive face grows deeper and deeper.  After Bill specifically went against her wishes to buy into Weber Gaming, the rift between them appeared to grow.  It looks like the sad divorce drama playing out between Bill's mom, Lois, and his father is a foreshadowing of Bill and Barb's eventual fate.

There's just two episodes left in the season, and my money's on Alby committing some violence and Barb leaving Bill.  Just a head's up, however: Next week, "Big Love" is moving back to Sunday nights, for two episodes only.  Remember back in the days when we were told it wasn't TV, it's HBO?  With goofy schedule changes like this, it seems HBO is sadly becoming TV after all.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

By a rough count, the Henrickson family was guilty of six of the seven deadly sins in last night's episode. Most normal families would probably be guilty of one or two in any given week, but coming from a family where the lead wife exclaims "Jehoshaphat" upon seeing a video strip poker machine, it's a surprising amount. But luckily for us, running down the list also serves as a great recap of the episode -- one of FOUR EPISODES LEFT, as the HBO ads keep reminding us.

Greed: Poor Nicki (Chole Sevigny). She racked up major credit card debt last season, and now, in the midst of her grief at her father's near-fatal shooting and her robbery of her family's money, she's picked up a new bad habit: bingo. By far the episode's best scene came when the Henricksons took a quick get-to-know-you tour of the local casino. Forget Bill's (Bill Paxton's) newfound obsession with video poker, Nicki's bingo love is taking the family nowhere good. Fast.

Last week, HBO promised that this week's "Big Love" would be the one we'd all be talking about. And, in spirit, it delivered on its promise: In the closing moments of Monday night's episode, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the conniving so-called Prophet and the closest thing the series has to an archvillain, was gunned down by the unhappy wives of a rival polygamist family.

Roman's shooting was certainly unexpected, but offing major characters has become a bit of an old standby for HBO. "Sopranos" kicked it up a notch when Tony capped Big Pussy in its second season. And remember Nate's death a few episodes from the end of "Six Feet Under"? Just once wouldn't it be great for HBO to promise a shock and then really deliver something unexpected? You know, like an alien invasion over Utah, or maybe the entire family contracts a flesh eating supervirus, or even a special appearance by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

We still don't know for certain if Roman is truly gone from the show -- we last saw him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk -- but I've learned that unless you actually see the body in the coffin, no death on TV is a done deal. If he is gone, it's just as well. The rivalry between Roman and his son-in-law, Bill (Bill Paxton), had pretty much run its course. There's no way their infighting would have ever resulted in anything more than a smashed window and hurt feelings.

(Photo courtesy of HBO)

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Snake pit

After an embarrassing family confrontation in front of her disapproving mother and sister, it seemed certain that Barb would drop a bomb on Bill in the closing moments of last night's episode.  Finally, it appeared the harried first wife might try to leave Bill in an effort to save herself and her children from the inevitable alienation of the polygamist lifestyle.  That's how it seemed, anyway, as Barb took off her earrings in front of the mirror and glanced at the marital bed she shared every third night with Bill.  But the producers had another surprise in mind: rattlesnakes.  A bed full of slithering, hissing rattlesnakes.

Just like their marriage, the bed looked warm and inviting.  But just beneath the surface lay a literal snake pit of seething vipers.  Quite the symbolic image to conclude the penultimate episode of the season -- and not just in reference to the inherent difficulties of the polygamist lifestyle.  In its second season, "Big Love" has mastered its mix of domestic comedy and hard-edged melodrama, keeping everything unpredictable.  Just when you think the show is going to go for the heartstrings, it goes for the throat.

But who left those snakes in Bill and Barb's bed?  There are two prime suspects: Alby, the temporary leader of the polygamist group at Juniper Creek, and Hollis Greene, the creepier-than-thou polygamist leader on the run.  Both are circling Bill and his family like a couple of hungry tigers waiting to pounce, and it looks like the confrontation will come sooner rather than later.

To prime-time TV's all-time great mysteries -- a list which includes "How did no one figure out Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were really dudes?" and "How did the landlords never figure out John Ritter wasn't gay?" -- we can safely add one more: "How have the Henricksons been married this long and not have everyone know they're polygamists?"

Last season ended with Barb being outed in front of Utah's governor.  Their polygamist lifestyle was publicly mocked on a high-profile billboard.  And don't forget Barb's sticky encounters with the child welfare officers over her teenage in-law Rhonda.  The family has had so many close calls and awkwardly staged excuses, we have to start wondering if they're only fooling themselves when they try to put on a front.  Yet they continue to encounter people who aren't in on the secret, and the charade continues.

With his move into the casino gaming business, Bill has been saying that this is the family's chance to come out into the open a little more.  Last night, he tried his best.  And he succeeded to some degree: The poker-loving proprietors of some of the West's swingingest bars certainly seemed to get a kick out of Bill's clean-but-not-so-squeaky image.  But when he ran into old friends from his and Barb's church-going days, Bill screwed up again.  Stumbling on his own sense of secrecy, he introduced Margene as his secretary.

Although he may tout the high and noble goals of "the principle" at home, it's apparent that to the world at large, Bill's wives are nothing more than a way to help him maintain his comfortable lifestyle.  How else to explain his marriage to second wife Nicki, the daughter of Bill's nemesis Roman Grant, who loaned Bill the money to start his home supply store.  As Bill has worked to move away from Roman's influence in his business dealings, he's put his most politically motivated marriage off to the side.  When Barb refused to accompany Bill to the bar owners convention, he balked at inviting Nicki.  Poor Nicki, meanwhile, is becoming more and more alienated from not only her husband but her family back at Juniper Creek.  Her confrontation with her brother Alby, in which she let slip Bill's acquisition of the hotly pursued Weber Gaming, will only lead to a harsher form of conflict than we've seen before.  Is it possible the lethally violent Greene family will make a reappearance?

And what of Barb?  With each episode, the look of concern on her normally passive face grows deeper and deeper.  After Bill specifically went against her wishes to buy into Weber Gaming, the rift between them appeared to grow.  It looks like the sad divorce drama playing out between Bill's mom, Lois, and his father is a foreshadowing of Bill and Barb's eventual fate.

There's just two episodes left in the season, and my money's on Alby committing some violence and Barb leaving Bill.  Just a head's up, however: Next week, "Big Love" is moving back to Sunday nights, for two episodes only.  Remember back in the days when we were told it wasn't TV, it's HBO?  With goofy schedule changes like this, it seems HBO is sadly becoming TV after all.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

By a rough count, the Henrickson family was guilty of six of the seven deadly sins in last night's episode. Most normal families would probably be guilty of one or two in any given week, but coming from a family where the lead wife exclaims "Jehoshaphat" upon seeing a video strip poker machine, it's a surprising amount. But luckily for us, running down the list also serves as a great recap of the episode -- one of FOUR EPISODES LEFT, as the HBO ads keep reminding us.

Greed: Poor Nicki (Chole Sevigny). She racked up major credit card debt last season, and now, in the midst of her grief at her father's near-fatal shooting and her robbery of her family's money, she's picked up a new bad habit: bingo. By far the episode's best scene came when the Henricksons took a quick get-to-know-you tour of the local casino. Forget Bill's (Bill Paxton's) newfound obsession with video poker, Nicki's bingo love is taking the family nowhere good. Fast.

Last week, HBO promised that this week's "Big Love" would be the one we'd all be talking about. And, in spirit, it delivered on its promise: In the closing moments of Monday night's episode, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the conniving so-called Prophet and the closest thing the series has to an archvillain, was gunned down by the unhappy wives of a rival polygamist family.

Roman's shooting was certainly unexpected, but offing major characters has become a bit of an old standby for HBO. "Sopranos" kicked it up a notch when Tony capped Big Pussy in its second season. And remember Nate's death a few episodes from the end of "Six Feet Under"? Just once wouldn't it be great for HBO to promise a shock and then really deliver something unexpected? You know, like an alien invasion over Utah, or maybe the entire family contracts a flesh eating supervirus, or even a special appearance by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

We still don't know for certain if Roman is truly gone from the show -- we last saw him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk -- but I've learned that unless you actually see the body in the coffin, no death on TV is a done deal. If he is gone, it's just as well. The rivalry between Roman and his son-in-law, Bill (Bill Paxton), had pretty much run its course. There's no way their infighting would have ever resulted in anything more than a smashed window and hurt feelings.

(Photo courtesy of HBO)

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Barb the bomb

To prime-time TV's all-time great mysteries -- a list which includes "How did no one figure out Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were really dudes?" and "How did the landlords never figure out John Ritter wasn't gay?" -- we can safely add one more: "How have the Henricksons been married this long and not have everyone know they're polygamists?"

Last season ended with Barb being outed in front of Utah's governor.  Their polygamist lifestyle was publicly mocked on a high-profile billboard.  And don't forget Barb's sticky encounters with the child welfare officers over her teenage in-law Rhonda.  The family has had so many close calls and awkwardly staged excuses, we have to start wondering if they're only fooling themselves when they try to put on a front.  Yet they continue to encounter people who aren't in on the secret, and the charade continues.

With his move into the casino gaming business, Bill has been saying that this is the family's chance to come out into the open a little more.  Last night, he tried his best.  And he succeeded to some degree: The poker-loving proprietors of some of the West's swingingest bars certainly seemed to get a kick out of Bill's clean-but-not-so-squeaky image.  But when he ran into old friends from his and Barb's church-going days, Bill screwed up again.  Stumbling on his own sense of secrecy, he introduced Margene as his secretary.

Although he may tout the high and noble goals of "the principle" at home, it's apparent that to the world at large, Bill's wives are nothing more than a way to help him maintain his comfortable lifestyle.  How else to explain his marriage to second wife Nicki, the daughter of Bill's nemesis Roman Grant, who loaned Bill the money to start his home supply store.  As Bill has worked to move away from Roman's influence in his business dealings, he's put his most politically motivated marriage off to the side.  When Barb refused to accompany Bill to the bar owners convention, he balked at inviting Nicki.  Poor Nicki, meanwhile, is becoming more and more alienated from not only her husband but her family back at Juniper Creek.  Her confrontation with her brother Alby, in which she let slip Bill's acquisition of the hotly pursued Weber Gaming, will only lead to a harsher form of conflict than we've seen before.  Is it possible the lethally violent Greene family will make a reappearance?

And what of Barb?  With each episode, the look of concern on her normally passive face grows deeper and deeper.  After Bill specifically went against her wishes to buy into Weber Gaming, the rift between them appeared to grow.  It looks like the sad divorce drama playing out between Bill's mom, Lois, and his father is a foreshadowing of Bill and Barb's eventual fate.

There's just two episodes left in the season, and my money's on Alby committing some violence and Barb leaving Bill.  Just a head's up, however: Next week, "Big Love" is moving back to Sunday nights, for two episodes only.  Remember back in the days when we were told it wasn't TV, it's HBO?  With goofy schedule changes like this, it seems HBO is sadly becoming TV after all.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

By a rough count, the Henrickson family was guilty of six of the seven deadly sins in last night's episode. Most normal families would probably be guilty of one or two in any given week, but coming from a family where the lead wife exclaims "Jehoshaphat" upon seeing a video strip poker machine, it's a surprising amount. But luckily for us, running down the list also serves as a great recap of the episode -- one of FOUR EPISODES LEFT, as the HBO ads keep reminding us.

Greed: Poor Nicki (Chole Sevigny). She racked up major credit card debt last season, and now, in the midst of her grief at her father's near-fatal shooting and her robbery of her family's money, she's picked up a new bad habit: bingo. By far the episode's best scene came when the Henricksons took a quick get-to-know-you tour of the local casino. Forget Bill's (Bill Paxton's) newfound obsession with video poker, Nicki's bingo love is taking the family nowhere good. Fast.

Last week, HBO promised that this week's "Big Love" would be the one we'd all be talking about. And, in spirit, it delivered on its promise: In the closing moments of Monday night's episode, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the conniving so-called Prophet and the closest thing the series has to an archvillain, was gunned down by the unhappy wives of a rival polygamist family.

Roman's shooting was certainly unexpected, but offing major characters has become a bit of an old standby for HBO. "Sopranos" kicked it up a notch when Tony capped Big Pussy in its second season. And remember Nate's death a few episodes from the end of "Six Feet Under"? Just once wouldn't it be great for HBO to promise a shock and then really deliver something unexpected? You know, like an alien invasion over Utah, or maybe the entire family contracts a flesh eating supervirus, or even a special appearance by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

We still don't know for certain if Roman is truly gone from the show -- we last saw him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk -- but I've learned that unless you actually see the body in the coffin, no death on TV is a done deal. If he is gone, it's just as well. The rivalry between Roman and his son-in-law, Bill (Bill Paxton), had pretty much run its course. There's no way their infighting would have ever resulted in anything more than a smashed window and hurt feelings.

(Photo courtesy of HBO)

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Seven deadly sins

By a rough count, the Henrickson family was guilty of six of the seven deadly sins in last night's episode. Most normal families would probably be guilty of one or two in any given week, but coming from a family where the lead wife exclaims "Jehoshaphat" upon seeing a video strip poker machine, it's a surprising amount. But luckily for us, running down the list also serves as a great recap of the episode -- one of FOUR EPISODES LEFT, as the HBO ads keep reminding us.

Greed: Poor Nicki (Chole Sevigny). She racked up major credit card debt last season, and now, in the midst of her grief at her father's near-fatal shooting and her robbery of her family's money, she's picked up a new bad habit: bingo. By far the episode's best scene came when the Henricksons took a quick get-to-know-you tour of the local casino. Forget Bill's (Bill Paxton's) newfound obsession with video poker, Nicki's bingo love is taking the family nowhere good. Fast.

Last week, HBO promised that this week's "Big Love" would be the one we'd all be talking about. And, in spirit, it delivered on its promise: In the closing moments of Monday night's episode, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the conniving so-called Prophet and the closest thing the series has to an archvillain, was gunned down by the unhappy wives of a rival polygamist family.

Roman's shooting was certainly unexpected, but offing major characters has become a bit of an old standby for HBO. "Sopranos" kicked it up a notch when Tony capped Big Pussy in its second season. And remember Nate's death a few episodes from the end of "Six Feet Under"? Just once wouldn't it be great for HBO to promise a shock and then really deliver something unexpected? You know, like an alien invasion over Utah, or maybe the entire family contracts a flesh eating supervirus, or even a special appearance by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

We still don't know for certain if Roman is truly gone from the show -- we last saw him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk -- but I've learned that unless you actually see the body in the coffin, no death on TV is a done deal. If he is gone, it's just as well. The rivalry between Roman and his son-in-law, Bill (Bill Paxton), had pretty much run its course. There's no way their infighting would have ever resulted in anything more than a smashed window and hurt feelings.

(Photo courtesy of HBO)

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': The one we'd all be talking about

Last week, HBO promised that this week's "Big Love" would be the one we'd all be talking about. And, in spirit, it delivered on its promise: In the closing moments of Monday night's episode, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), the conniving so-called Prophet and the closest thing the series has to an archvillain, was gunned down by the unhappy wives of a rival polygamist family.

Roman's shooting was certainly unexpected, but offing major characters has become a bit of an old standby for HBO. "Sopranos" kicked it up a notch when Tony capped Big Pussy in its second season. And remember Nate's death a few episodes from the end of "Six Feet Under"? Just once wouldn't it be great for HBO to promise a shock and then really deliver something unexpected? You know, like an alien invasion over Utah, or maybe the entire family contracts a flesh eating supervirus, or even a special appearance by Donnie and Marie Osmond.

We still don't know for certain if Roman is truly gone from the show -- we last saw him lying in a pool of blood on the sidewalk -- but I've learned that unless you actually see the body in the coffin, no death on TV is a done deal. If he is gone, it's just as well. The rivalry between Roman and his son-in-law, Bill (Bill Paxton), had pretty much run its course. There's no way their infighting would have ever resulted in anything more than a smashed window and hurt feelings.

(Photo courtesy of HBO)

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': All balls in the air

Maybe it's HBO's new ad campaign -- which, more than ever, seems intent on evoking the latter days of "The Sopranos" in its intensity -- but "Big Love" appears to have taken a big leap forward in these last couple of episodes, not only creatively but dramatically. With its multiple plot threads beginning to fully develop, the series has reached a fever pitch.

In Monday night's episode, at least four major subplots were given due attention, some of which have been stewing since the series' earliest days. First and most intriguing, there was the rapidly escalating turf war between competing creepy old polygamists Roman Grant and Hollis Greene (Harry Dean Stanton and Luke Eskew). Just when Roman's strong-arm approach was beginning to seem almost as familiar as family, we were given an even more disturbing cult leader -- one who issues videotaped declarations of supremacy with all the thuggish panache of Osama bin Laden. Standing with his wife in front of a map of the world was one of the episode's greatest touches.

No less disturbing was the sudden reappearance of Bill Henrickson's dad, Frank Harlow (Bruce Dern), who showed up to terrorize Bill's mother, Lois (Grace Zabriskie), and attempt to claim half her profits in a laundromat business. He also used his visit to terrorize his daughters-in-law Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Wanda (Melora Walters).

For a show whose main concern is domestic misadventures, "Big Love" has been surprisingly adept at shifting gears into an uneasy dread. Take for example, the scene in Wanda's lonely home on the compound, with the screaming wind blowing under the eaves, the power going out and god knows what lurking outside with a flashlight and heading toward the door. At the very worst, it would have been Frank (it wasn't), which, come on, isn't all that scary. But somehow, the way the scene was built and shot would have made it an easy fit into an episode of David Lynch's creepfest "Twin Peaks."

Then Bill was given the chance to protect his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried, pictured) from her stalker uncle, Alby (Matt Ross). Bill's beat-down, delivered behind closed doors, was reminiscent of Tony Soprano's similar defense of Meadow earlier this year.

With all this going full-bore, it seemed like a distraction to have Margene's mother, Ginger (Bonnie Bedelia), come to visit. Though her initial impression of "March of the Penguins" was amusing, Ginger was a typical drunk, full of self-pity, manipulations and accusations. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) got to be less naive, which was probably a welcome relief for Goodwin, but Ginger seemed like just one more disapproving family member in a show crammed full of them.

HBO just announced the series will be returning for a third season, so don't expect complete resolution to any of these plot threads any time soon, but in the life of every series there comes a sweet spot -- sometimes it lasts just a season, or a handful of episodes; sometimes it goes on for years -- where the creative magic appears to flow with ease. It's safe to say that "Big Love" just entered its own.

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Big questions

Is it possible for a polygamist to cheat on his wives?  Or does the polygamy part take all the fun out of it?

Just how much damage will Rhonda Volmer (Daveigh Chase) inflict on the Henricksons?  And how will she be stopped?

Who is the mysterious Hollis Greene (Luke Askew)?  And is that aggressively butch woman his wife?

And, more important, is there any way we, as viewers, can appeal to the show's creators to keep the charming Serbian waitress Ana around for a few more episodes?

Last week, the show's direction seemed to be meandering, but this week's episode brought everything back onto stable ground.  It also expanded the bizarre cast of characters that inhabit the parallel universe of polygamist Utahans. (Is that even a word?)

Gone this week were Roman, Alby, Lois and the rest of Bill's extended family at Juniper Creek. Strangely, they weren't missed.  Maybe it's their dusty, drab lifestyle or Roman's constant pontificating, but without them "Big Love" took on a lighter feeling, and the whole episode felt a little zippier.

It helped that, for the first time, the show's creators introduced a true outsider into the mix in Ana, a Serbian waitress who caught Bill's eye. This week, we followed their courtship and eventual breakup, brought about, oddly, by Margene's overeagerness at the whole affair.  Bill is such a control freak that all it took was Margene's blessing to kill the mood of naughty fun.

Finally, after weeks of clean-cut suburbanites and ankle-skirt-loving compound-dwellers, we were given a character completely unmotivated by religion or complex family loyalties. It's almost too bad that her final scene, backlit by the fluorescent glow of the diner where she works, seemed designed to say goodbye to her character for good. Though an outsider within the confines of "Big Love," she was by far the most mainstream character the show has seen.

As sad as it was to see Ana go, it was even more thrilling to discover Hollis Greene, a polygamist Godfather who goes Roman's villainy one better and seems to guide his wives like they are henchmen in a Steven Seagal movie.  Instead of a desert compound, the Greenes inhabit a murky warehouse, complete with hungry dogs and a lead wife whose clothes could have come from the Baby Face Nelson collection.  His preferred calling card is a cattle brand on the rear end of those who have crossed him. If that isn't a great character introduction, I don't know what is.

With the Greenes now lurking on the sidelines, Bill's and Roman's inter-family squabbles seem less important.  How can Roman possibly compete with a guy who treats his rivals like beef?

And let's not forget Rhonda, who now seeks to get her way through media manipulation.  Given the chance to talk to the local newspaper, she spilled her guts and in the process implicated Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) in a cross-border child-russling scheme. She also implied that abuse was happening in the Henrickson household.  Her payback is coming, you just know it is.  But hopefully it won't happen too soon.  Working in a little more Rhonda-hate can only make the justice sweeter.  Maybe they'll marry her off to the Greenes.  Is it wrong to want a little girl to get branded?

-- Patrick Day

(Photo courtesy HBO)

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Judgment Day

I was raised Catholic.  I attended Mass almost every Sunday, went to Sunday school, took first Communion and got confirmed.  I remember thinking it was a superior religion based soley on the facts that our services were finished in just under an hour (compared to the hour-plus at the Lutheran church my mom attended) and that Catholic priests were made to seem pretty cool in "The Exorcist" and "The Father Dowling Mysteries."

I am no longer a practicing Catholic -- somehow the greater theological teachings escaped me -- but my overriding impression of the religion is pretty benign, aside from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course.  So it was with troubled amusement that I watched Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) rail against the "hocus pocus" evils her young son Wayne was being taught at his Catholic school in Monday night's "Big Love."  She stood in the church, staring aghast at the votive candles and hearing of the Holy Trinity from a church official and demanded, "Why would you believe that?"  As always, she was wearing her ankle-length skirt and high-necked blouse -- the standard-issue polygamist uniform, apparently -- and we were made to feel somewhat superior to her.

Here was a woman who couldn't help but scoff at the religious iconography of a set of rosary beads and who considered belief in the Virgin Mary so much mumbo-jumbo, and yet her own religious beliefs caused her to share her husband with two other women and gave her a father who lived on a compound and called himself "The Prophet."  Oh, the irony! 

It's taken awhile for the creators of "Big Love" to confront the Henricksons' religious beliefs head-on, but with Nicki's personal crusade against Catholicism they finally did and, unfortunately, they blinked.  What has up until now been an extremely even-handed portrayal of a modern polygamist family creeped closer to becoming a didactic mockery of its central characters.   

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': Help me, Rhonda

If ever there were a show that encouraged an unmarried life with no children, it's "Big Love."

With each passing episode, any thoughts that having a small army of women around the house to do your bidding might be an attractive prospect have slowly been crushed beneath the tangled network of humanity that makes up Bill Henrickson's life. The frothiness of "The Girls Next Door" notwithstanding, we can only imagine the scheming domestic minefield Hugh Hefner wakes up to every morning. Although no one has undertaken such a task, any attempt to map out the show's varied conflicts, allegiances, rivalries, betrayals and hidden agendas would no doubt result in a flow chart complex enough to make an MIT grad proud.

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': One long middle

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."

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.

'Big Love': A different kind of mob

Now that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes (we know in our hearts that it's true, so let's all stop arguing) it falls to Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) -- father, owner of the rapidly expanding Home Plus chain of stores and recently exposed polygamist -- to carry on HBO’s torch as their leading harried patriarch.

On the surface, the clean-scrubbed Henrickson family of "Big Love," which started its second season last week, is worlds away from the bottom-feeding Sopranos, but look again: both families revel in materially comfortable lifestyles while coping with the quiet fear that one day it’ll all be taken away by faceless authority figures that seem to stand in for a disapproving mainstream society. Both pay constant lip service to personal virtue while at the same time indulging the deepest desires of their ids. And both have a talent for getting into conflicts that inevitably lead to violence.