Stanley Fish, surprisingly, has praise for the television drama, Big Love, in particular for the first episode. He thinks viewers like it because it values family life and has likeable characters. He likes the resilience of the “modern” polygamists (as opposed to the ultrareactionary cultists who live on the “compound”), whose life he sees as approaching a democratic ideal if not achieving it. He also praises the series for its aesthetic qualities, comparing it to highly regarded shows including The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Deadwood. Really? The series is entertaining but in my opinion it is not much more than that. Here is a sample scene from the episode Fish discusses. The characters speaking are married women in their twenties. -- I can’t carry boxes and watch over the little boys at the same time. -- Yes you can. OH YES YOU CAN. Father, do you see what she’s doing? She’s sassing me! It is silly, even preposterous. It approaches the level of absurdity that David E. Kelley has sunk to. But maybe the premise itself is so bizarre -- in spite of its basic plausibility -- that implausible plotting and dialogue seem almost normal. Fish is right to notice that the same was true of The Sopranos and is now true -- to a lesser extent -- of Mad Men. Fish compares the plotting to those series (and, oddly, to Deadwood -- the third season, maybe, but not in my own opinion the first and second), saying “you have to think about it afterward and figure it out yourself.” But that’s not it, exactly. What the plotting is, is episodic. One thing happens, and then another. A crisis is introduced, we move on to another, a crisis is resolved, there’s another crisis. Chloe Sevigny says she will do anything -- even move away -- so as not to hurt Bill. She announces, “They took my ladder.” Scene change: A Chloe Sevigny lookalike foreigner with no previous interest in Mormonism appears and says she wants to join the family. Cut to black. This is the transition that so took Stanley Fish?! The plot lines are connected by virtue of their contiguity, not by any logic. There is currently a subplot involving a house occupied by teenage throwaways from the ultrareligious “compound”: the boys wrestle, live in squalor, do meth and heroin -- while the girls living among them continue to wear their colonial-style long dresses and bonnets, dream of returning home when they turn eighteen and can do as they wish, and spit at the girl who lives with her father (a onetime throwaway himself), calling her a whore. Interesting -- but interesting in a way that intersects with all the other interesting aspects of these people’s ways of life? To me it all feels thrown together: anything that seems like it might fit is simply included wholesale. Potentially more original: the workplace scenes, which at times are given nearly equal prominence, since Bill also considers his prosperity to be a part of his eternal legacy. But as businesspeople, they are the same as businesspeople elsewhere. They have problems at work. Just like they have problems at home. The only thing that makes them different is who they sleep with. And the fact that they have extra wives around to do the scutwork.
UPDATE: My husband disagrees (though he doesn’t agree with Fish either). (1) Big Love is nothing like David E. Kelley (who, actually, I liked and made excuses for, up to the second season of Boston Legal). (2) The sister-wives in the scene I quote were teenagers, not twenty-something women, and my quotation doesn’t prove my point. (3) The plotting with multiple storylines makes perfect sense and does not just skip randomly from crisis to crisis, and she does not look like Chloe Sevigny. (4) The whole point of the show is that the way they live doesn’t matter, and I didn’t emphasize this fact enough.
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