Premise
Utah
In looking at some of the press for this series, I frequently saw it described as a "non-judgmental" take on polygamy. I would say that, structurally, it goes somewhat beyond that. Yes, the show does depict the downside of polygamy; the commune is a patriarchical horror show, and even within Bill's family, first wife Barb is sometimes reduced to tears by what she's lost, eldest daughter Sarah is disgusted by the lies her family tells, and eldest son Ben seems to be following in his father's footsteps in all the wrong ways. But nevertheless, Bill and his family are the protagonists, and they're portrayed very sympathetically (though Bill and second wife Nicki somewhat less so than the others). I can't imagine that there are too many viewers out there who watch this show and don't root for the Henricksons to make it work. One of the most likeable characters on the show is third wife Margene, and she can frequently be found genuinely beaming about how great her life is and how awful it must be to raise a family without sister-wives as a source of support. As such, Big Love is hard not to read as, structurally if not intentionally, pro-polygamy. So the question is: is there anything wrong with that? The first time I remember thinking about this question was in high school. My big high school crush, active from the middle of my sophomore year until a year after I graduated, was on S., who was virtuous and innocent and very sweet to me and eventually became my best friend, though it soon became clear that I didn't have a chance with her and that we would be kind of a weird match anyway. Then my senior year I developed a crush on L., who was smart and creative and attainably hot and more the sort of girl I felt I should probably be involved with. The thing is, my crush on L. did not change my feelings for S. one bit! I simply went from having one crush to having two. So when I randomly found myself in a big conversation — I think it was in philosophy class on a day that we had a sub — in which someone asked, "Is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?", I had a hard time believing that this could even be a question. To me it seemed as ridiculous as asking, "If you had two kids, do you think you could really love both of them?" Love isn't a finite resource. But there's more to the polygamy question than just that. And let's put aside the patriarchical FLDS model that we see in Big Love. Because while the media does occasionally get interested in Warren Jeffs and other polygamous cult leaders, more relevant is the fact that, among certain subcultures, non-patriarchical polyamory has begun to gain acceptance. I first became aware of this several years ago when a married couple on ifMUD announced that they were going to see other people while remaining together. A surprising number of other MUDders said that they were doing the same, and #polyamory tended to float in the upper reaches of the active channel list. But not everyone was on board. I remember one person making the very reasonable case that while love isn't a finite resource, time and attention from one's significant other are, and that she couldn't imagine herself blithely giving up a big chunk of her share. Jennifer, with whom I was involved at the time, was even more unequivocal. When I asked her what she thought about the issue, she said, "Sounds like a great way to wreck your family," then added, "There has never been a society in human history in which polyamory worked." That seemed like a bold claim, but I wasn't the one with a degree in anthropology so I didn't really have any grounds upon which to disagree. But even if Jennifer was correct, I have to wonder — is monogamy really any better? Does it "work"? I can think of precious few people my age whose parents are still together, and many have made the point that, at least in the modern West, the choice seems to be less monogamy vs. polygamy than whether your polygamy will be serial or parallel. And even before the divorce rate skyrocketed, infidelity seems to have been close to universal, so maybe it's more a matter of whether your parallel polygamy will be acknowledged or not. But that aside — how do the two systems compare in terms of happiness for the participants and in terms of offering a stable environment for raising children? Here's what I get: Say you have a couple — we'll call them William and Elizabeth — and William falls in love with someone else — we'll call her Olive. Under monogamy, William has two choices: abandon Elizabeth to take up with Olive, or stick with Elizabeth and tell Olive to take a hike. Either way, someone gets rejected and William has to break off one of his relationships. And even the "victorious" partner now must live with the knowledge that part of William's heart is with someone else, even if he isn't acting on it. Under the type of polygamy practiced in Big Love, however, William can split his time between the two women. That works out great for William, but neither woman gets his undivided attention, so things are suboptimal for both of them. Now let's say that William and Elizabeth have kids. Monogamy means that there's a chance that Dad's going to skip out to be with Olive. Under polygamy, Dad will definitely be around half the time, but will also be away half the time, leaving the kids to be raised by a single parent, unless they follow the Big Love model so closely as to establish a single household. None of this is ideal. Now, those who know their comics already know where I'm going with this based on the names. For William and Elizabeth Marston are the creators of Wonder Woman (and the polygraph), and they lived in a polygamous relationship with William's former student Olive Byrne. The difference is that all three legs of the triangle were operational and William didn't need to shuttle back and forth between the two women. Elizabeth had two children, Olive had two, and the four kids regarded all three adults as their parents; after William's death in 1947, Elizabeth and Olive continued to live as a couple until Olive's death forty years later. So there you go! Problem solved. Simply make sure that all nC2 relationships in the household are lasting bonds of true love and that you have enough bisexuals in the mix to make it work. Easy! By which I mean we are all doomed.
Series Now imagine that this is an ongoing TV series. You have no idea how many seasons it'll run for. How do you make a sensible outline when you don't know whether you'll have to wrap up everything in twelve episodes, or twenty-four, or thirty-six? Ideally, the creators would be able to figure out how long it'd take to tell the story they want to tell, and shoot exactly as many episodes as necessary. But when corporations get involved, these series become commodities more than they are narratives. As long as the series remains profitable, it is in the producers' interest to postpone any final resolution as long as possible. Furthermore, the series can't drift very far from its initial premise, because that's the commodity the corporation is selling. One of the classic examples here is Spider-Man. When Spider-Man debuted, he represented a dramatic break from his counterparts at DC Comics, because he had problems beyond stopping dastardly supervillains from taking over the world — family problems, money problems, girl problems. Readers loved the underdog superhero and Spider-Man became immensely popular. But all too often, the writers assigned to the Spider-Man books did what writers tend to do with problems: they resolved them. They had him learn things from his adventures and grow as a person. Eventually there came a time that people who picked up Spider-Man comics were reading about a well-adjusted, successful adult happily married to a model. Which is a great place for Spider-Man to end up... except that, as the hero of an ongoing series, Spider-Man could never "end up" anywhere. Spider-Man wasn't a character; Spider-Man was a product, and that product was "hard-luck adolescent superhero." So every time he deviated too far from the product description — reboot! I became very suspicious of Big Love when the first season came and went and the premise hadn't really changed. Bill was still warring with Roman Grant. Barb was still conflicted about her life as a polygamist. Nicki was still torn between her loyalties to her father Roman and husband Bill. The conflicts that were resolved tended to be resolved anti-climactically. There's a big build-up about Bill secretly taking too much Viagra; he starts to have problems with his vision; he stops taking Viagra. That's the whole subplot! And of course, in an ongoing series, once you resolve one problem, you kind of have to come up with another one so the character has something to do. Nicki starts off with a secret shopping problem that gets her into massive debt; eventually the others find out about her huge credit card bills; she goes into counseling. Next season, Nicki starts to develop a secret gambling problem. I never understood why "episodic" had such a negative connotation among writers and critics, but I do now.
Secrets Anyone who's read even the tiniest bit about narrative has heard the old Hitchcock bit about how having a bomb go off may give you five seconds of surprise but that showing the bomb being planted can give you five minutes of suspense. The viewers supposedly watch the scene with heightened attention, all a-tingle because they know what's coming. But this strikes me as all too similar to Dan Shiovitz's complaint about giving characters terminal illnesses to make otherwise boring scenes seem more meaningful: you're not just washing the dishes, you're Washing The Dishes With Cancer. The Hitchcock version is just a little more action-oriented: Washing The Dishes With A Bomb. (Which I guess is one way to handle those tough grease spots.) And it doesn't even work! I pay less attention to the scene because I'm so impatient about getting to the bomb. Secrets function the same way. Big Love has these family dinners with eleven people gathered around the table, six of whom are hiding something. It's not just dinner, it's Dinner With A Secret! This just makes me want to jump through the screen, blab out all the secrets and get it over with. And so:
Lies I understand that we don't go around telling the whole truth to everyone we meet. No one would want us to — in the extreme case, you'd end up like Prak if you tried. But there's a difference between omission and outright mendacity. For instance, every term at the company I teach for, there are classes taught by veterans and classes taught by brand new hires. They've all been though a fairly rigorous training program, but still, if a teacher shows up and announces to the class, "It's my first day!", chances are that the kids' parents will all call to complain and have their children transferred to a teacher with more experience. And so company policy is that new hires are not to discuss their experience or lack thereof. I'm not a huge fan of this policy, but I can live with it. However, at one office I worked for, I discovered that one member of the staff was flat-out lying to a parent who'd called to ask about a certain teacher's experience — the teacher was completely new, but the staff member said, "Oh, yeah, she's been working for us for a year and a half." To me, that is completely unconscionable, and I threatened to quit over it. Fortunately, that staff member quit shortly thereafter. So I don't mind the fact that the Henricksons don't, upon moving in, immediately announce to all the neighbors that they're polygamists. I don't even mind when one of the wives refers to one of the others as "my neighbor," because that, while misleading, is actually true. But when Bill says that Margene is his secretary, or when Margene says that the reason she's pregnant is that she's acting as a surrogate mother... those are just lies, and they make me like the characters a lot less.
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