HBO's 'Big Love' aims for religious accuracy
 
By Katharine Heriges
The Daily Beacon - University of Tennessee, Knoxville
 
For those of you who don’t know, the best drama on television is not "Lost," "Brothers and Sisters" or the many incarnations of "CSI." Rather, that honor goes to HBO’s "Big Love," an underappreciated series that has one of the most original premises ever.

"Big Love" is about Utah businessman Bill Hendrickson (Bill Paxton), a fundamentalist Mormon with three wives. Sure, you’re probably not watching it, but you should be.

And not only is "Big Love" chock full of compelling stories and interesting characters, but it offers something rare for television, or media in general. "Big Love" goes through exhausting amounts of research to make sure that the religious aspect of the show is as close to reality as possible. "Big Love" has to depict a wide variety of Mormon beliefs both respectfully and accurately (two things that don’t always go hand-in-hand, especially with fundamentalist groups) — first there are the regular LDS Mormons that Bill frequently finds himself at odds with, then there are the compound-dwelling fundamentalists (similar to the Warren Jeffs-led clans seen so often on the news) that Bill is at odds with even more, and finally there are the fundamentalist Mormons like Bill’s family, ones that live average lives among us but all under the umbrella of "The Principle."

So rare do we see religion and the religious depicted in a thoughtful way on television (or in movies, for that matter), despite the fact that so many Americans claim to be religious in some form or another. What Christian doesn’t remember the nauseating "7th Heaven," a show whose premise had definite promise (large family with a pastor for a father, their various trials) but digressed into standard teen drivel, completed when in later seasons Ashlee Simpson and Haylie Duff were added to the cast for "very special" episodes? Other examples of Christians on TV are usually just walking stereotypes, who only appear whenever TV writers need characters to act ignorant and homophobic. And while a small minority of Christians are ignorant and homophobic, this hardly represents all of them, and how could it? There are hundreds of denominations of Christians in America; not all of them believe exactly the same thing.

Jews and Muslims are equally stereotyped. Jewish characters are hardly ever seen practicing Judaism or talking about their faith, only commenting on their religion to make stereotypical jokes ("Kosher! Old grandmas! Potato pancakes! Circumcision! Hahaha!"). Muslims are seen as just the opposite — always very devout, rarely with a sense of humor about their faith. While these stereotypes are easy to fall back on and generally politically correct, what about showing a Jewish person actually going to temple? Or a Muslim who only maybe goes to mosque once a month?

That’s why I’ve got to tip my hat off to "Big Love." While they probably don’t get everything right, they certainly try. At least one of their writers, newly crowned Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, actually grew up Mormon, and the creators of the show went to a polygamy compound to research the show. HBO also did some interviews with families that live a similar lifestyle to the Hendrickson’s suburban polygamy, and they all said that the show was right on point (though they disagreed with the amount of sex on the show).

Also, the characters are real. Bill and his wives are not completely enveloped by their religion — they run businesses, they socialize, they have problems with each other, they have sex, they take pills, they scheme. And when they talk about religion, they also have doubts about the life they’ve chosen, and they question their beliefs and what they mean. Despite the strict nature of Mormonism in general, there’s not a lot of religious judgment going on among the family (though judgment does come in torrents from various people outside the family). It makes the characters on "Big Love" intensely relatable, which is what makes the show great, for the religious and the non-religious alike. 

— Katharine Heriges is a senior in English. She can be reached at lheriges@utk.edu.
 
dailybeacon.utk.edu
Originally published Monday, March 9, 2009 issue
 
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