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...Bella Thorne took over from Jolean Wejbe, who had played Tina, Bill and first wife Barb's youngest child Tancy) and brought a new kid into town (Cara Lynn, the long-lost daughter of Bill's second wife Nicki). Some of these plot tweaks can be waved away because Big Love has a narrative more hurtling and congested than any series I know; it makes Mad Men's plotting seem staid by comparison ... But Olsen and Sheffer must also think that testing the credulity of the storyline, is a smart way to keep their viewers debating, guessing and glued...
Then, in a single episode a few weeks ago, Big Love managed to jump more sharks than Evel Knievel in a sequel to Jaws. The whole Henrickson family went nuts, even by their own elastic gauges of plausibility. Eldest daughter Sarah more or less abducted and adopted a junkie Indian mother whom Barb had knocked over with her car on the reservation. On a trip with Bill to Washington, D.C., Nicki was found packing a pistol in a government building. Wife No. 3, Margene, gave her sort-of-stepson Ben a big smooch, recorded live on the home-shopping...
...love Big Love. I love how it extended the standard HBO series premise - "They're a family... of mobsters, of Roman emperors, of vampires... who fight and stick together like any other family" - into the social and political saga of Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), an ordinary guy in suburban Salt Lake City who happens to have three wives and a bunch of nutter relatives out in the woods. The show works simultaneously as family-values-affirming drama and deadpan surrealist farce: Father Knows Best meets Twin Peaks. And its creators, Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, seem to keep those...
Most of these events struck me as game-changing, potentially deal-breaking lapses. They gave me a queasy feeling that all was not well with Big Love - the same foreboding I got when, at the beginning of this season, the show junked its much-loved "God Only Knows" ice pond opening-credits sequence for one that blended slo-mo falling, a la Mad Men, with what looked like a commercial for Preference by L'Oreal. (Do you fast-forward through that opening when TiVo-ing the show? I do.) But in the past two episodes, I've come to think...
...mother Lois, his brother Joey and all three sister-wives - got in a tizz over two events involving Bill's eldest son Ben. Word of the not-quite-inadvertent kiss has spread, a news story soon topped by the bulletin that Bill "exiled" his son. Moments before Bill's big debate at the convention, Barb tells him to reconcile with Ben - "right away, this minute, or I swear I'll check myself into the boobyhatch" - then confronts Margene, whose fury makes her blurt out, "Eff you!", at which Barb angrily kicks a leg out from under Margene's display table...