Big Love: The Complete Second Season

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

When Big Love, a drama that unflinchingly portrays the life of a polygamist Mormon family, premiered on HBO in March of 2006, it was a show that almost inevitably would cause a lot of controversy and uproar and be accused of glorifying polygamy. However, to the show’s credit, audiences are not only drawn to the series’ fantastic cast and their great performances, but to the incredibly layered storytelling that expresses both the negative and positive aspects of such a type of family.

As HBO’s longtime favorite The Sopranos had finally come to an end, Big Love’s only seems to have gotten more bigger with audiences when its second season premiered during the summer of 2007. It is now available on DVD as Big Love: The Complete Second Season.

It continues the story of the Hendricksons, an earnest, well-meaning family that lives in a picture-perfect house on an idyllic suburban community in Salt Lake City, Utah. However, they have a very big secret: they are polygamists.

Husband and father Bill (Bill Paxton) is the successful CEO of a burgeoning Utah hardware store chain. He also is a follower of a branch of a traditionally polygamist Mormon faith, married to three different wives whom he each has children with and each family live in three separate houses directly against one other.

His first wife, the down-to-earth Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is an ambitious, domineering personality who works part-time as a teacher. His second wife, Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) is a prim-and-proper personality who is deeply strict about adhering the family to the fundamentalist Mormon way. His third wife, the young Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a bubbly and hopelessly naïve woman who’s often desperate in her attempts to prove herself as an equal.

When we last left our intrepid clan, the Hendricksons must do some serious damage control after it is discovered that someone has exposed their secret lives as polygamists. Nicki soon realizes that the man who secretly exposed them was none other than her own father, Roman (Harry Dean Stanton), the leader and deemed “Prophet” of the United Brotherhood Effort, a corrupt fundamentalist Mormon organization, which also runs a deeply repressive polygamist collective farm on Juniper Creek.

Meanwhile, Margene, who is pregnant with another child and now fully steeped in the Mormon faith, seeks to gain more respect with the family, particularly when she begins to befriend and encourage the relationship of a waitress Bill is secretly having an affair with. Meanwhile, Bill himself, still seeking to rid his family from the clutches of Roman’s tight grip, plans to increase his fortunes by investing in a gambling operation known as Weber Gaming, which Barb strongly objects to.

However,