Word: polygamists
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...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 wives. Pharmaceutical assistance is involved...
They also didn't want to write an advertisement for polygamy, which in real life has been associated with child abuse. (Although practiced by early Mormons, polygamy is banned by the church, the show notes in a disclaimer.) Bill was abandoned by his polygamist family as a boy, only to return to his religious roots in midlife. "He's on a spiritual quest," says Paxton. "His core belief is that we're put on this earth to procreate. He's a healthy apple tree, and it's his job to produce healthy apples...
...Love is exciting and fascinating too. Beneath his bland exterior, Paxton subtly shows the pressures of trying to be the breadwinner of a '50s-style household (that would be the 1850s) in the 21st century. And the polygamist compound where Bill grew up keeps pulling him back, Corleone fashion, from the 'burbs, driving the plot in dark, gripping directions. Stanton is perfectly cast as the pious, menacing Roman, who insists on the cut from the second store, although, legally, Roman is an investor in only the first. "There's man's law, and there's God's law," he warns...
...same.") He has to keep the arrangement semisecret because polygamy is illegal in Utah and banned by the mainstream Mormon Church, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Oh, and one of his fathers-in-law (Harry Dean Stanton), the patriarch of a fundamentalist polygamist compound, is shaking him down for a cut of his hardware business. The Osmond family these Utahans...
...states. In the drama, which debuts in summer 2006, characters declare their faith as easily as those on Deadwood swear. Co-creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, neither of whom is Mormon, say they were interested in the conflict within Bill, who came from a polygamist compound but now lives in the mainstream suburbs of Salt Lake City. The fundamentalists, says Olsen, see the LDS Church "as sellouts and apostates." Mainstream Mormons, he adds, "wish the compounds would go away...