This engaging series is one of the zaniest soap operas yet offered by HBO -- which is saying something given their record to date. It adds plural marriage to a list of subjects including whimsical vampires (True Blood), dysfunctional funeral directors (Six Feet Under), and narcissistic Hollywood groupies (Entourage). What's next? Fundamentalist cross-dressers? The paucity of genuine drama on cable television is nowhere as evident as in these recurrently fun but trite exercises in topical one-up-man-ship. Each episode strains for originality only to sink under the weight of multiple off-beat characters and subplots that ultimately carry the classic message of theater: no matter how bizarre the overall concept, we always recognize parts of ourselves to the extent that it's hard to hit the "off" button. So we continue to look for and appreciate the really excellent work of veteran actors like Harry Dean Stanton and Mary Kay Place and the novel or nuanced interpretations offered by younger ones like Chloe Sevigny.
There are in fact no good guys or bad guys in soap opera, only conflicted protagonists and misunderstood foils. If there is a political message, it is that any virtue or vice carried to extreme lengths turns on itself and destroys the perpetrator. Serious theater on the other hand magnifies good and evil pitted against one another, often within the same character, employing a dramatic structure with finite limits.
In Big Love we have just an ongoing feast of delectable and endless possibilities involving sort-of good guys and sort-of bad guys that cause us alternately to boo or applaud with gusto. A real treat.
There are in fact no good guys or bad guys in soap opera, only conflicted protagonists and misunderstood foils. If there is a political message, it is that any virtue or vice carried to extreme lengths turns on itself and destroys the perpetrator. Serious theater on the other hand magnifies good and evil pitted against one another, often within the same character, employing a dramatic structure with finite limits.
In Big Love we have just an ongoing feast of delectable and endless possibilities involving sort-of good guys and sort-of bad guys that cause us alternately to boo or applaud with gusto. A real treat.