"Big Love" Swan Song: Goodbye to All Those Sister Wives

So I’ve been a fan of HBO’s series Big Love since it began, and now that it’s in the final episodes (I think there are two left now), it’s going out with a dramatic bang. Bill Paxton and Jeanne Tripplehorn are great, although more often than not Chole Sevigny, as Nikki, steals the show, getting to play the bad girl of the sister wives. (It’s about FLDS polygamists in Utah.) Last season it jumped the shark when Bill got elected to the Utah State Senate, which didn’t really make much sense or seem very plausible, but that did set up the death knell for the show. Like Jon Krakauer’s excellent nonfiction Under the Banner of Heaven, it’s an interesting look at Mormons and polygamists in the West, a more common phenomenon than most Easterners might think. My second home in Custer County has one of the highest populations of FLDS outside of Utah, dwarfed only by the infamous Zion Ranch in Texas. Although Big Love was never quite as good as, say, The Sopranos, it was a good show, whose swan song time has come.