Word: lovingly
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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...
That should be enough for one terrific episode, but not on this show. When Big Love wants to get really creepy, it turns to Alby, who after the death of the patriarch Roman Grant, his and Nicki's father, has assumed control over UEB, because God told him to. He's declared that Adaleen, Nicki's mother and Roman's widow, should be "sealed" (wed) to J.J., Nicki's reptilian first husband; and Adaleen, with odd docility, agrees. At the sealing ceremonies, Nicki bursts in to find that Alby is planning to seal Cara Lynn, Nicki...