MAYBE you know a family like the Henricksons. But probably not.
The father, Bill, is a genial home improvement chain store owner in Salt Lake City. He lives with three wives and seven children, in three adjacent homes in the suburbs. Needless to say, it's complicated.
Some of their problems are the usual ones -- work, money, sex, children -- scaled up by a factor of three. The others are extraordinary. As extralegal, consenting polygamists trying to blend into respectable society, they must hide their arrangement from the neighbors, the police and the mainstream Mormon community. And then there are the fundamentalist relatives -- eccentric, corrupt and possibly homicidal -- who live off the grid in a rural compound but can't stay out of Bill, Barb, Nicki and Margene's life.
What glues them all together is "Big Love," the title of HBO's new version of the twisted family drama that attracted so many devotees to "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under." Though the modern-day polygamy might shock some and repulse, tickle or titillate others, the network and the family's creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, expect people will relate to the Henricksons because they epitomize, in their own way, the essence of Middle American family values.
Big love, Scheffer said, is "that bigness and generosity of heart that allows you to survive the messiness." The series, which has 12 episodes this season, premieres March 12.
After middling successes with original series such as "Rome," "Deadwood" and "Entourage," and misfires such as "The Comeback," HBO executives must surely hope "Big Love" will renew its reputation for top-notch original series. In "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under," audiences related to characters who would otherwise appear alien through the ordinariness of their family lives. In "Big Love," the characters would be quilts-on-the-wall, family-dinner-type, sports-loving suburbanites were it not for their secret life.
The ensemble project has attracted the talents of feature film veterans Bill Paxton in his first romantic lead as the square-jawed, work-a-daddy Bill; Jeanne Tripplehorn as the reluctant but solid first wife, Barb; Chloe Sevigny as the troublemaking, shopaholic second wife, Nicki; and Ginnifer Goodwin as the inexhaustible and naive third.
