Big Love

Big Love is an HBO television drama about a Utah family that practices polygamy. Big Love stars Bill Paxton, Chloë Sevigny, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ginnifer Goodwin and Harry Dean Stanton.

The show was co-created by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer who also serve as executive producers. Olsen and Scheffer spent two and a half years researching the premise of the show, with the intent of creating a fair portrayal of polygamy in America without being judgmental. The series theme song is "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys; musical score for the series is composed by David Byrne. The score for the first season was composed by Mark Mothersbaugh.

The series revolves around Bill Henrickson, his three wives Barb (legal wife/first wife), Nicki (second wife) and Margene (third wife), and their combined family of seven children. Henrickson lives with his family in three neighboring houses in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City.


Season 1 introduces the main characters and revolves around the family's struggles to live their polygamous lifestyle while keeping it a secret from the outside world. While Bill goes about expanding his chain of home improvement stores ("Henrickson’s Home Plus"), he struggles to balance his three wives and his strained relationship with Nicki's father, Church prophet Roman Grant. From his compound on Juniper Creek, Roman seeks to gain a greater share of the profits from Bill's business ventures. Bill, who is resentfull towards Roman for expelling him from Juniper Creek as a teenager, opposes this and manipulates his alcoholic brother Joey, a former NFL player, to gain a seat on the church's board of directors, in order to undercut Roman's considerable influence and to maintain a level of autonomy from his controlling grasp.

Bill's first wife Barb is shown to be the anchor for the plural Henrickson family, but as the show progresses it is revealed that Barb has mixed feelings about the concept of polygamy and only her love for Bill makes her stay. Meanwhile, second wife Nicki (daughter of Roman) struggles to fit in with modern life outside the compound and her own desire for power within the family dynamic. Nicki compensates for her isolation by developing an addiction to shopping, leading her to become $60,000 in debt via credit card charges.

Third wife Margene (who is barely twenty years old) meanwhile struggles to find her place within the family, as both Barb and Nicki look down upon her due to her youth and fertility, having given birth to two children via Bill and is pregnant with her third child.

Most of season one focuses on the family's struggle to keep their family's secret from their friends, neighbors, and co-workers. However, things come to a head when Barb is nominated for a "Mother of the Year" Award, resulting in her and Bill being outed as a polygamist couple. Meanwhile Joey's mentally unstable wife Wanda poisons Alby Grant (Roman's son and chief minion) when Alby discovers that Bill is using Joey as a pawn in his scheme to undermine Roman's power within the church and threatens the two.