Big Love in the Media (twop forum) links:

Good review from today's NY Daily News.:
Bill Paxton plays Bill Henrickson, a man who owns a home-improvement store and lives on a suburban Salt Lake City street with his wife, Barb and their children. So far, so normal. But next door to them lives Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), known in the neighborhood as a young, attractive single mother. Next to her is Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), another single mother, slightly older and with slightly older offspring.
ok so that answers my main specific question [What do the neighbors Think?] but I am still curious since as I wondered, wouldn't single mothers be frowned on in the setting they are in? maybe not, maybe their neighborhood is progressive enough, not an especially religious Utah community...
nb my other specific qstn, after watching the HBO preview, is: why does Barb say she's having an "affair" with Bill? ~likely answer?: they are having sex during the time he is ~allocated~ to other wives (eg the scene in the kitchen pantry) - but, is he allocated that way? I know his nights are designated but.

Seattle P-I did a review. It too is favorable. ~hmm, not very:
The Sopranos is the premium channel's only remaining series that gives people a burning reason to subscribe and stay with it. There will never be anything like The Sopranos again, and HBO's executives know this. Instead, they're shooting for a more attainable target, a show approximating the quality level of Six Feet Under. well that sounds great to me, 'course I did not too into the Sopranos from that one dvd I saw when in Kensington, whereas 6fu was pretty compelling, entertaining, if not a show I would watch repeatdly ~ did not love any of the chars but enjoyed the high quality production as a whole. Big Love begs for us to see it in that light, but if there's depth to be explored, it can't be found in the first few episodes.

The best part is the romantic rectangle at the show's core. The dynamic among the three wives, and their plays for attention and affection, are unique in television. great! exactly what I want.Add to that their separate relationships with Bill, and their individual dreams, fears and secrets, and these are three fascinating women. And Paxton, as Bill, indeed lives up to his own conception of his character as "the ultimate multitasker."..Bill Henrickson, like Tony Soprano, is trying to find a way to make things work, to stave off predators, and to keep his family together and safe. "Big Love" also has a perfectly chosen theme song (the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows") and a sense of wild, wonderful unpredictability. "Big Love" sounds like a high-concept, comedic, intentionally sensational enterprise. Parts of "Big Love" are sensational, all right. But only in the best sense of the word.=more from NY Daily News. that's favorable.

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle waxes enthusiastic about Big Love here. (Minor spoilers, mostly related to the premise and outlining the basic lines of dramatic conflict in the series.):
Every writer and producer in Hollywood wants to get a show on HBO. The trick is in the combination of emotional relevance, originality and auteur mentality. Here the idea was to create a series about marriage. In ratcheting up the premise, HBO tries to tackle polygamy in a modern setting -- outside of the backwoods, secretive lifestyle of old-school wife sharing and just outside the dissociative stiff-arm of the Mormon Church. "Big Love" takes place in suburban Salt Lake City. Paxton, a wonderfully underappreciated actor to begin with, plays the everyman -- if a polygamist can be called that -- with just the right dose of religious assurance, modern-man happiness at getting a shot at sex with three women all week long, and the haggard look of a guy who was clearly not careful about what he wished for. What works best here is the religious approach -- there's no effort to make Bill look like a kook, or subtly mock his convictions. He is what he is. That's the premise. This is a complex role that Paxton nails immediately.
The grist of "Big Love" works because it goes beyond Bill's modern experiment and incorporates Mormon characters who disapprove of polygamy and are all too willing to root out the participants (who are living, fearfully, in secret). It also sets Paxton against Harry Dean Stanton, one of this country's greatest character actors, who plays Roman, the all-powerful head of a polygamist commune in Utah, where Bill's parents still live. Paxton's Henrickson character is intriguing because, along with Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the eldest of his three wives, they have decided to separate both from the wilder, more repressively structured ways of commune-centered polygamy and also the Mormon Church. They are, in essence, unaffiliated believers -- and now upwardly mobile, to boot.
Bill has three kids with Barb, two with Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) and two with Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). But the polygamist utopia he has created for himself in Salt Lake is rife with discord. First off, Nicki is constant trouble. She's selfish and addicted to consumerism, which is difficult for Bill on both levels. His religion looks down on wanton consumerism, and the fact is, he's pretty overextended. If Nicki is more like a petulant teenager, Margene is downright girlish. It probably doesn't help that Goodwin doesn't look a day older than 17. Margene (like Nicki) looks up to Barb as the eldest wife, but acts the child and has conflict -- much of it rooted in sexual competition -- with Nicki.
What HBO has in "Big Love" is a very original, extremely well-acted and complexly written drama. Add Bruce Dern and Grace Zabriskie as Bill's squabbling polygamist parents, and you've got an all-star cast in a seriously grown-up vehicle. What hinders "Big Love" and needs patience is that the series is complicated and thus told slowly. And that's perhaps the greatest perk that HBO enjoys. Since subscribers have already paid for the service, they have more patience for complicated, grown-up television.
You don't have to be a savvy married man to realize the prospect of three wives might be appealing on a sexual level (the series isn't shy about selling that), but in no way are the complications of hiding secrets from the outside world and quelling jealousies from the "sisters" worth the significant grief that comes with the good times. nice writing. One look at this odd but anxiety-producing series -- perhaps it should have been called "Big Headache" -- is more than enough proof that the grass isn't always greener over two more fences. and again.

-All the reviews are raves, it seems. HBO kicks ass.

Slate isn't too thrilled with it, though.
The review goes in a really weird direction, though. Not sure how much it helps.
-My goodness, that is indeed a weird direction for the Slate review. Wasn't too surprised to see that the writer is pissed at the very idea of a series about polygamy that examines it as a lifestyle choice without flashing "THIS IS BAD, OK?" in big neon letters, but when she veered off into a crazy homophobic rant? "There is a sense in which the homoerotic ethos has triumphed?" What?
[Boy Meets Girl, Then More Girls
HBO's Big Love and the stuffy side of polygamy. By Daphne Merkin
Updated huh Friday, March 10, 2006]
For me, the really disturbing aspect of the series is not that it soft-pedals the lifestyle's darker sides—its reliance on a constant supply of young women, its tolerance of incest and pedophilia under cover of God's law, its exiling of younger men who might compete with the older males of the community for wives. is that a purpose behind the custom of going on missions? It's that the show's creators—who happen to be a gay couple—have written a series that wears its values on its sleeve, albeit unwittingly, and those values are, in a word, heterophobic. The result is that polygamy never looked worse than it does here, suggesting not an end to the humdrum rhythms of marital life but an alarming extension of them. I cannot help wondering whether some of this dreary message is attributable to the simple fact that the show's creators can't quite imagine their way into figuring out what all the whoop about men and women is about. If homosexuality has gone from being the love that dare not speak its name to the love that proudly carries the torch of erotic passion, heterosexuality has gone from being the only game in town to a failed sideshow. nice use of idioms, but I think the twop comment above is right - heterosexuality as failed sideshow - what?! come on. even on tv, it's still the majority of families... Meanwhile, keep your eye on the two women playing footsy in the fourth episode of Big Love: Here's betting that's where the action will be. this probably doesn't refer to an actual scene, but I guess I hope it does.

elsewhere in twop forums a link to another Salon article
[I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
The economic case for polygamy. By Tim Harford - undercover economist.
Posted Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006]
just a mention of Big Love at end
ah yes the link was the word polygny, and the person posting it explained that she was purposely not using polygamy since there don't appear to be any multiple-husband arrangements. hence this article, for its distinction:
There are not many marriageable men to go around in Chechnya. So, acting Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, probably not a feminist, proposed a radical step: "Each man who can provide for four wives should do it." Polygyny (having more than one wife, as opposed to polygamy, which is having more than one spouse) is admissible under Islamic law but not Russian law, so Kadyrov is unlikely to make much progress with his proposal.
But what difference would such a law make? It's natural to assume that polygyny is bad for women, partly because most of us would rather have our spouse to ourselves, and partly because we look at a place like Saudi Arabia, where polygyny is not uncommon, and note that women aren't even allowed to drive.
I'm not quite so convinced. A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can't add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men— [thus making unfortunate] the poor saps whose potential wives decided they'd prefer one-quarter of a billionaire instead. In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power. huh. and interesting - this article goes on as a considerations of this unexpected parallel to the situation in Chechnya:
There are several states where one in five young black men are behind bars (versus 1 in 100 American men over all). Since most women marry men of a similar age, and of the same race and in the same state, there are some groups of women who face a dramatic shortfall of marriage partners.
... When men are taken out of the marriage market by war or by prison, women suffer. The reverse is probably true, too: When women are taken from the marriage market, men suffer. In China, the policy of one-child families coupled with selective abortion of girls has produced "surplus" males. Such men are called "bare branches," and China could have 30 million of them by 2020. Perhaps polyandry—women with multiple husbands—would be the logical response to the situation in China. What will happen instead is that these lonely, wifeless men will end up sleeping with a relatively small number of women—prostitutes—with severe risks of sexually transmitted disease all around.
All this suggests that Kadyrov has a point about Chechnya.