Shortly after starting my PhD I got in the habit of watching tv online before going to bed. One and a half years later I think I’ve run out of all the good tv shows. But now I’m perfectly happy to watch just about anything because I’ve realized that watching tv before going to bed helps me wind down and fall asleep. This whole preamble is an explanation, and perhaps a justification, for why I’ve recently been watching the HBO drama Big Love, which I currently watch with ambivalence and growing annoyance.

I’m ambivalent because the first season of the show has good and bad aspects. To begin with I find the subject of fundamentalist Mormons and polygamy interesting in a fucked up and potentially subversive way. I also like Harry Dean Stanton and find some of the characters like Bill, Barb and Chloe Sevingy somewhat complex and interesting. I also like how they combine the fact that Bill is a ruthless, greedy businessman with his religious ideals. It always makes me think of Mitt Romney and the republican marriage of neoliberalism and fundamentalism.  I  felt like the show began by dealing with these ideas of fundamentalist Mormonism, polygamy and business with some sense of complexity, albeit on a personal level.

What I don’t like, however, is the increasing turn in season 2 towards the show playing like a normal family soap opera where the polygamous family is treated as a good, decent, typical tv family: Bill is the bread winner and his wives are all happy in their marriage and love each other as sisters and their kids have teenage problems. In fact, its sorta making me hate them, especially Bill, who deserves some sort of comeuppance. This isn’t because I’m anti-religious, but because I feel like its taking the sachcryne convention of tv drama and liberal tolerance to the extreme and turning what could be a good show about how weird the institutions of religion and the family are into a message that all religions and families no matter how unconventional can and deserve to be conventionally happy. (Of course, this reading might be challenged by others who think I am being naive and by following such narrative conventions the show is showing how constructed they are and thus resisting them, but I don’t see it). Also, they totally haven’t answered my bigesst question about Mormon’s– what’s the whole magic underwear thing?