Big Love

Dropping the final curtain on a beloved series is a television ritual that can be hard to get right. When a finale isn't done to fans' satisfaction, it can give rise to bafflement and dismay, as arguably happened with recent high-profile series such as "Lost" and "The Sopranos. " Now and then, though, a show pulls off a final episode that is applauded and embraced, for the most part, by fans and critics alike. This season, it happened with two shows: "Friday Night Lights" and "Big Love.

Irene Dunne The actress-singer of "The Awful Truth" fame played Tracy's character's gal pal in the 1943 romantic fantasy "A Guy Named Joe. " Lana Turner The "Sweater Girl" appeared with Tracy in 1941's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and 1947's "Cass Timberlane. " Jean Harlow The sassy blond bombshell teamed with Tracy for 1931's "Goldie" and 1936's "Libeled Lady. "

'Big Love' Where: HBO When: 9 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

Dropping the final curtain on a beloved series is a television ritual that can be hard to get right. When a finale isn't done to fans' satisfaction, it can give rise to bafflement and dismay, as arguably happened with recent high-profile series such as "Lost" and "The Sopranos. " Now and then, though, a show pulls off a final episode that is applauded and embraced, for the most part, by fans and critics alike. This season, it happened with two shows: "Friday Night Lights" and "Big Love.

HBO's Emmy-free and too long under-appreciated "Big Love" came out of its yearlong, writers-strike-created hiatus like the buffed-up guy tired of eating sand. But instead of going for fireballs and kidnappings (OK, there were a few of those, but they were totally incidental), cancer scares and intra-cast murder attempts (well, yes, there were those too, but again, not the point), creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer took their strange and startling American fable to new heights, and depths.

The problem with having what is arguably the best, and certainly the largest, cast on television is that if you want to give them all something interesting to do for a season that lasts only nine episodes, things can get a little crazy. That's what the creators, and fans, of "Big Love" discovered over the last few months as a soap operatic tangle of story lines -- Bill's running for state office! Ana's back and she's pregnant! Nicki's mother married Nicki's ex-husband! The Greens kidnapped Frank, Lois and Ben!

Five years ago, few people would have pictured Chloë Sevigny as a prairie skirt-clad polygamist. She came to HBO's " Big Love," which begins its final season Sunday, with a pedigree in underground fashion and indie film, having appeared in edgy movies like "Kids," "Boys Don't Cry," "American Psycho" and the infamous "Brown Bunny. " The series offered Sevigny a chance to ditch her hipper-than-thou image with the role of Nicolette (Nicki) Grant, the manipulative daughter of a polygamous prophet trying to find a place for herself alongside two sister wives in the Henrickson family.

"Big Love" has been blazing through its third season. Will Scheffer, who created the show with Mark V. Olsen, his partner in work and husband in life, said, "Everything that we hinted at, that we were building to, we said: 'Let's just do it -- let's go as far as we can this year and burn through it.' " The results: Love has ebbed a bit for now, and we have been left with big.

Bruce Dern needs to be at the top of his game to play Frank Harlow, the ornery, manipulative, possibly demonic polygamist the veteran actor plays on HBO's "Big Love." It's not a role for the faint of heart. The father of the show's protagonist Bill (Bill Paxton) and a lifelong member of the Mormon sect at the Juniper Creek compound, Frank kicked his son out at age 14 and they've been bitter enemies ever since. The rascally Frank also has a love-hate relationship with Bill's mother, Lois (the equally off-the-wall Grace Zabriskie)

For anyone who has watched HBO's "Big Love," it would be easy to presume costar Chloe Sevigny to be icy and aloof, yet in conversation she is engagingly warm and a bit of a goof, with a streak of puncturing self-deprecation. She has an unexpectedly modest primness about her, albeit offset slightly by a pair of remarkably short shorts out of which sprout impossibly long legs.

Mireille Enos, 35, is reportedly in talks to appear in her first big film role — costarring with Brad Pitt in Paramount's zombie thriller, "World War Z. " Enos, who lives in Los Feliz with her husband, actor Alan Ruck, and their 7-month-old daughter, Vesper, declined to discuss the project, but she opened up about her starring role as Detective Sarah Linden in AMC's breakout drama "The Killing" and playing twins on HBO's Mormon polygamy drama, "Big...

Showtime's new comedy "Episodes," which recently concluded its first season, follows the adventures of a married couple in Hollywood as they adapt their British hit show to American TV. This being television, they are assailed by all manner of sexual and social silliness, but the show is still a rare example of art imitating life. Currently, at least a half-dozen successful shows, including "Big Love," "The Good Wife" and "Blue Bloods," are being run by writers who not only work but also sleep together.

SUNDAY With so many Americans out of work, why would "The 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards" bring back Ricky Gervais (above) as host? Perhaps because nobody takes celebs down a peg quite like the sly, snarky and veddy British comedian. (NBC, 5 and 8 p.m.) There's a whole lotta "Big Love" in store as the polygamy-themed dramedy launches its fifth and final season. Bill Paxton plays the put-upon paterfamilias, with Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin as his better halves.

'Big Love' Where: HBO When: 9 p.m. Sunday Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

Five years ago, few people would have pictured Chloë Sevigny as a prairie skirt-clad polygamist. She came to HBO's " Big Love," which begins its final season Sunday, with a pedigree in underground fashion and indie film, having appeared in edgy movies like "Kids," "Boys Don't Cry," "American Psycho" and the infamous "Brown Bunny. " The series offered Sevigny a chance to ditch her hipper-than-thou image with the role of Nicolette (Nicki) Grant, the manipulative daughter of a polygamous prophet trying to find a place for herself alongside two sister wives in the Henrickson family.

As so often happens, the source of " Big Love's" greatness almost proved to be its undoing. For three seasons, the HBO drama about a polygamist family was astonishing in its narrative agility, able to persuade increasingly devoted audiences that the Henrickson clan ? one husband, three wives ? were not all that different from their non-polygamous counterparts. The cats-cradle of familial relationships, set against Juniper Creek, the polygamous compound where "Little House on the Prairie" gingham concealed hearts right out of "Scarface," allowed creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer to explore character and story in a way that would otherwise require three or four separate shows.

Nancy Olson Livingston was all of 20, a theater arts major at UCLA and a newly signed ingénue at Paramount when she was cast as Betty Schaefer in "Sunset Blvd.," Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece about Hollywood. The film starred Gloria Swanson as the former silent movie star Norma Desmond; William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter who agrees to write her comeback vehicle; Erich von Stroheim as Max, Desmond's former husband and director now working as her butler and chauffeur; and Livingston as the young reader at Paramount, who falls for Joe. "Billy Wilder did something unusual before I was cast," Livingston recalls.