Affection for 'Big Love' only grows larger
Posted: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 6:00 AM by Paige Newman
Filed Under:
TV
Note: If you haven't been watching the current season, there are spoilers below.
“Big Love” is one of those series that grew on me slowly, but that now has me fully in its grasp. While its first season was devoted to explaining the premise of a man who was raised in a polygamist sect and who’s married to three women, and the second season was about the complications that came with those choices, this season feels fully about characters rather than concepts. And it’s become positively Shakespearian in terms of its drama and the connections the characters have to one another.
HBO |
Chloë Sevigny, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Ginnifer Goodwin are the three sister wives of "Big Love."
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The character who really stands out this season is Nicki Grant (Chloë Sevigny). From the outside it would appear that Bill’s (Bill Paxton) second wife has the least chemistry with him, but this season what viewers realize is how much this pair has in common. Of the three wives, Nicki is the only one who truly understands the way Bill was raised, as they both grew up on Juniper Creek compound, and the only wife that truly knows what it means to live The Principle as Bill does.
There was a moment in this season’s third episode (“Prom Queen”) where we find out that Nicki has been married more than once. Her father, the prophet Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), had put her picture in “The Joy Book” (used to shop the girls to prospective husbands) and she’d been married off as a teen against her will. And, when she's confronted with this secret from her past, her mixture of shame and defensiveness feels so utterly true to life that it's almost painful for viewers.
Later in the episode we see her rip her picture out of the Joy Book and weep on the shoulder of her boss (a lawyer who is trying to prosecute her father and doesn’t realize who she really is). Every negative feeling that you may have had about this character, whom Sevigny wisely never tries to make her likeable, just evaporates.
In that moment, you really know why she’s with Bill, that like him, she needed to escape her life, but did so in a way that allowed her to hang on to her belief system.
And yet both characters, especially this season, struggle to live within the rules they were raised under. In episode four ("On Trial"), after the charges are dropped against Roman and he tells Nicki that he owes his freedom to her, she responds by quietly pushing him down the courthouse stairs. The gesture is almost childish, not quite satisfying (after all, her father did go free), and completely Nicki.
All I want to know is what she'll do next. Now that’s the sign of a great TV show.
Do you watch "Big Love"? Tell me what you like or don't like about the show.
