If you’ve been following the HBO series Big Love up to this point, you can’t help but blame most of the problems the polygamist Henrickson’s family is facing in the final season on anyone but the clan’s patriarch Bill (Bill Pullman). That doesn’t make the scenarios any less entertaining, just hair-tuggingly frustrating when he questions why God is testing them. Job was tested – Bill Henrickson was just idiotic in just about all the decisions he made up to this point.
A quick primer for the uninitiated, Bill is a small business owner in Utah married to three women with nine children. The family is unaffiliated with the Mormon Church and the nearby polygamist compound that Bill was kicked off of when he was a teen. They live relatively normal suburban lives… with the obvious exception of the plural marriage. At the end of the fourth season, Bill – newly elected to the Utah state senate – had just revealed that he is a polygamist (Seriously. And this guy wonders why things have gotten so hard for the family).
Season five is one of the most satisfying since the series began with Bill and his family dealing with the fall out of his decision to come out of the polygamist closet, his first wife Barb (played brilliantly by Jeanne Tripplehorn) struggling with her own religious beliefs, third wife Margene (Ginner Goodwin) rising in the ranks of a ponzi-scheme sales business and second wife Nicki (Chloe Sevigny) dealing with her teen daughter’s affair with a teacher. And that’s just one season folks.
As if that’s not enough drama to hook you, the season and series ends without a copout sanitized ending (ok, it’s a little bit of a cop out, but not much).
Big Love: The Complete Fifth Season/4 DVDs/600 Mins/HBO Studios/2011