Monday, August 20, 2007

AND THIS I KNOW, HIS TEETH AS WHITE AS SNOW: I've said before that I'm just lukewarm on Big Love, a show that often seems a bit bland and inconsequential to me, with all of the exciting stuff just pasted on. I'm not admitting I'm wrong, but I wanted to show a little appreciation for the turn the show has taken.

To recap, Season 1 seemed to me to be a cheerfully nonjudgmental view of polygamy. In that season's guns-don't-kill-people-do thesis, there were good (righteous, well-intentioned, spiritual, normal) polygamists and bad (self-righteous, venal, incestuous, creepy) polygamists, and the only things they had in common were plural marriage and the need for a buffer against legitimate society. For the Henricksons, plural marriage wasn't so different from regular marriage. As a result, three of our heroes were saintly and well-adjusted, and the other's problems seemed to stem more from her relationship with the bad polygamist camp than from her current polygamy.

If Season 1 was about how plural marriage could be normal within a family of normal people, Season 2 is about how very hard that can be, particularly when the people aren't as normal as they first seemed. Season 1's most nominally mature Henricksens -- Bill and Barb -- have both revealed themselves as self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, and manipulative (the musical pun in the post title is apt -- this season Bill literally bares his teeth quite a bit, in both aggression and in grimacing pain). Nikki continues to have hysteria and impulse-control problems, and Margene and the eldest kids are struggling to reconcile polygamy with their interactions with the rest of the world (excellent work by Amanda Seyfried this week, as Sarah lets Bill know how little he understands his relationship with his family). And everybody seems at wit's end with Bill's autocratic caprice. It's been a pretty subtle and satisfying unraveling of Season 1's hard work.

After all that, though, unless something really unusual happens next week, the signature image for me will still be Selma, the transgendered polygamist with a blow torch and branding iron.

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