Big Love

Is polygamy the new monogamy? HBO’s Big Love chronicles the lives of the Henricksons, a middle-class family like so many others—except that Salt Lake City businessman Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) has three wives, eight children, and a truly evil father-in-law who heads a creepy, cultlike compound. The series, created by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer (who are executive producers along with Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks), is a quiet social satire driven by surprising humor that “lies mostly in the deadpan juxtaposition of bland bourgeois values and the weird mores of polygamy,” writes New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley. A sister-wife who dyes her hair like Marilyn Monroe? Mormons buying casinos? It’s addictive stuff.

Photo—HBO