We never watched Big Love, and we were always mystified that anyone would want to watch a show about polygamy. Ew! But Ginia Bellafante’s recessional opened our eyes a bit.

Perhaps nothing is less sexy to the prototypical thinking woman who watches HBO than the sort of man he represented, someone blind to his own subversions and immune to ambivalence. During the course of the series many women told me that they had stopped watching “Big Love” after a few episodes because polygamy as a notion was just too distasteful. This might be translated to mean that Bill Henrickson didn’t seem to have the right to all of the sex he was getting — not the way Don Draper, by virtue of his emotional afflictions, has the right on “Mad Men.” Women forgive the demonstratively tortured but never the brutally dull “nice.”

“Big Love” arrived in 2006, the pre-Obama age, and the series was served up as a chewy slab of sirloin for the network’s liberal audience, offering in Henrickson a character bound to infuriate as he seemed to enjoy an Esalen-era sex life without having to concede to the philosophies and politics that might attend it. The series always made “the principle” — the ostensibly religious foundation for the Henricksons’ living arrangement — vague enough to feel entirely suspect if not absurd. Tony Soprano was an appealing avatar of Clintonian compartmentalization and appetite. Henrickson was a distinctly Bush-era counterpart, forever unquestioning and wed to his certainties. His righteousness, merely annoying at first, became increasingly repellant as the series progressed and his hypocrisies mounted.

That he was partially redeemed in the final hour, granting his first wife, Barb, the religious autonomy she craved, seems peripheral to the larger matter of his actual death. In the end the series chose to affirm the idea that families must exist, as much as they can, as democracies. In an epilogue depicting the Henricksons 11 months after Bill’s death, we see the women existing as a kind of contented, collectivist sorority, with the youngest wife, Margene, finally pursuing her dream of medical volunteer work abroad as she guiltlessly leaves her children behind with her sister wives.

Literally speaking, a disgruntled and out-of-work neighbor — a casualty of the recession and his own traditionalism — shot Bill Henrickson. A mainstream Mormon, he explicitly resented Bill’s heresy and implicitly couldn’t stomach his virility. This was a man who couldn’t care for his lawn or even a single wife as Bill simultaneously bed-skipped his way through three marriages. Figuratively, though, it was all of us who pulled the trigger, all of us who could never really give over our sympathies to a man who seemed to get way more than he deserved. The dictator had to go.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 8:00 pm.