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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Here's the thing they don't tell you about polygamy: it's murder on your cell bill. Early in Big Love (HBO, Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) checks his calls. He has 16 messages. He's got three wives, three mortgages and seven kids. His father (Bruce Dern) suspects Bill's mother of poisoning him. Bill is opening a new branch of his Salt Lake City, Utah, hardware store, and his shady, polygamist-patriarch father-in-law Roman (Harry Dean Stanton) is demanding a cut. Then there's the matter of, er, keeping up with three...
...waiting for a wink or satirical nudge, it's not coming. Surprisingly for HBO, which has never exactly courted family-values conservatives, Big Love, for all its R-rated content, takes its deeply religious characters on their own terms. Olsen and Scheffer, both coastal gay men--"We're not red state, Mark and I," Scheffer deadpans--have invested their milieu with a sense of place and unsarcastic wholesomeness. "So much of this country has become subsumed by mass culture," says Olsen. "There's still something uniquely Utah, uniquely other that I admire. Would I want to live there...
...there is one question that defines The Sopranos, it is, "Why do good things happen to bad people?" As the HBO show returns from a nearly two-year hiatus (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., starting March 12), Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) continues to live his charmed life. The mafia business is booming. He is a free man, escaping the Feds through one lucky turn after another, while his ally/rival, New York boss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) is locked up. He's fat and happy-as happy as Tony gets, anyway-in the prime of his career, shoveling $40-a-piece sushi...
...well Tony has done for himself in his ruthless unexamined life-and whether or how he might pay for it-is shaping up to be the theme of what creator David Chase says will be its last season. (HBO will run 12 episodes this spring; then the show returns for a promised final 8 in January.) Previous seasons have introduced new characters and rivals to the mix?Richie Aprile, Ralph Cifaretto, Tony Blundetto-but the four episodes of season 6 screened for critics focus tight on the existing circle of characters. (Though they do, in a twist...
Elsewhere, Levy talks to female CEOs (the female head of HBO now claims to have the “biggest cock in the business”), goes to bars with hip young lesbians, and discovers the sexual politics among wealthy teens...