New HBO Series - Big Love able2know forums
-seems really edgy. I always love the way HBO manages to appeal to the voyueristic side of me.

www.hbo.com/biglove - watch preview.

village voice >> TV by Joy Press : All in the Family basic premise—one husband, three wives, seven children— that promises a feast of emotional friction rarely seen on TV.

Heading the homemaker hierarchy is first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the most mature, educated, and "modern" of the three women; she works outside the home as a substitute teacher and accompanies Bill to public events.
Second wife Nicki (Chlo Sevigny) resents her in-between status, constantly sniping at Barb (or "Boss Lady," as Nicki dubs her) while pulling rank on third wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). Barely legal, Margene still acts like a kid and seems most herself when rassling with Barb's boner-prone teenage son.
Since polygamy is illegal and any hint of perversity might sink Bill's business, the family has to pass for normal. From the street, each house looks separate, but their backyards join to create an alternate moral reality. but ...! how do they dissimulate? do neighbors think that Nicki and Margene live without husbands? wouldn't that itself be scandalous in this neighborhood?

In some ways Big Love belongs to the recent TV trend of suburban dramedies like Desperate Housewives and the short-lived Book of Daniel—themselves a partial return to the '80s kitsch noir Americana of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. But in other respects it resembles a totally different series set in the suburban hinterland, The Sopranos, which serves as HBO's Sunday-night lead-in for Big Love. Like our favorite mob drama, Big Love spikes garden-variety family tensions with skulduggery, corruption, and menace. Owner of a chain of home improvement stores, Bill is desperate to sever ties with Roman, the original investor, who is now demanding a tithe on all future franchises. With his bolo tie, parchment skin, and beady eyes, Harry Dean Stanton has never looked more sepulchral and sinister, as he declares, "There's man's law and there's God's law, and I think you know which side I'm on." Bill longs to escape the prophet's tentacles, a situation further complicated by the fact that Nicki is Roman's daughter. Maybe the marriage was part of Bill and Roman's business transaction, the blood tie that sealed the deal. It's hard to sympathize with Nicki as a pawn of the menfolk, though; Sevigny plays her as a sullen, manipulative creature with a vicious shopaholic streak that leads to terrifying credit card debt. ...The titanic clash between honest Bill and slimy Roman could easily play out across several seasons.

Big Love's menagerie of repellent characters risks turning off the viewer: Bill's mom and dad, played by veteran freaks Bruce Dern and Grace Zabriskie, are wildly cantankerous, and Roman's child bride seems spooky verging on psychotic. But through it all shines the decency of Bill and Barb, constantly in the process of making moral calculations. Intriguingly, the series intimates that Bill took up polygamy out of principle rather than active desire, and you sometimes sense that he'd be happier riding off into the sunset with Barb, leaving the younger wives in the dust. read in some other article that ~ took second then third wife only after Barb became infertile (after ~ 3 children). But instead he's chosen to raise his kids (and the other wives) on this weird cusp—one foot in the polygamous, out-of-time society of Juniper Creek and one foot in the mainstream Mormon Utah of fast-food joints and iPods.

idol chatter on belief.net
And now this "Big Love," which sounds like a celebration of the supposed normalcy of polygamy--which is widely known as a framework for male sexual power and gratification and female subjugation.