# Big Love (2006)

> A Salt Lake City hardware store owner juggles three wives, seven children and a fundamentalist family past.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/4175

## Facts

- Seasons: 5
- Episodes: 53
- Episode runtime: 60 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama
- Created by: Will Scheffer, Mark V. Olsen
- Network: HBO
- Cast: Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, Ginnifer Goodwin, Amanda Seyfried, Grace Zabriskie, Joel McKinnon Miller, Daveigh Chase
- TMDB rating: 7.7/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421030/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: moderate
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: mild
- Tone: intimate, conflicted, melancholic, wry, tense

## What critics say

Audience reception is positive, with viewers praising the lead performances and the show's nuanced portrayal of a polygamous family balancing domestic life and faith.

## Synopsis

Big Love (2006-2011) is an American HBO drama series created by Will Scheffer and Mark V. Olsen. Bill Paxton plays Bill Henrickson, a hardware store owner in suburban Salt Lake City who lives with three wives, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), and their seven children. The engine of the series is Bill's constant balancing act: keeping three households running, expanding his business, and hiding his plural marriage from neighbors and the wider world. The story is pulled back into his past when troubling news arrives about his father, forcing him to reconnect with his parents, who live on a fundamentalist compound in rural Utah, where Bruce Dern's Frank Harlow looms over community life. Each season is built from domestic crises, financial pressures and religious politics, with episodes of family rivalry and personal ambition. The five-season serialized drama unfolds across the suburbs and the compound, shaped by a conflicted, intimate tone that blends wry humor with melancholy and dread. Fans of Six Feet Under and The Sopranos will find resonance in its portrait of a family hiding behind a respectable front, with its moral compromises and emotional strain.

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