Big Love Television Program

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.

The weather reports might have shown that it was a sunny mid-November afternoon in Southern California, but inside a Santa Clarita-based "Big Love" soundstage, a storm is brewing. Tucked within a nondescript building sit the three Henrickson houses, and head wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is quietly working at the island in her kitchen. That is, until sister-wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) slips in through the back door and nonchalantly drops that she had gone out and done something . . . huge.

"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.