HBO’s Big Love created by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer is about a fundamentalist Mormon family living in suburban Utah. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) is the patriarch of the said family, he has nine children with his three wives; Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nikki (Chloe Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). Shit is always going down.
Bill Henrickson is also a giant douche.
I realise that by watching TV shows in marathon form over a few weeks pulverises your mind and makes you crazy. I had the same problem with Weeds after being forced to watch five seasons in a Bali hotel room for a whole week. By the way, I hate Nancy Botwin. I think by watching the same characters make the same mistakes over and over again, hour after hour of episode after episode, something clicks in our brain and makes us hate the characters that we are supposed to feel sympathy or joy or really anything for. It’s like travelling with a friend; you can’t spend that much time with someone, be reliant on that person, live, spew and take suspicious drugs with that person and not grow to despise them at least to some minute capacity. Television marathons and a viewers relationship to the characters they’re watching work in much the same way.
Bill keeps fucking up. When will he learn? When will he look at himself and say “Yeah, i’m a douche, maybe I should stop being one.” I know this is hard for normal people and even harder for fictional characters in TV shows because writers need that constant conflict. Bill’s conflict is himself although he treats his wives as if they are the problem. Which they are in many cases but that’s what happens when you have three wives, Bill. Nikki spends money on bullshit, Barb is so self-righteous it makes me sick, Margie has her flaws but is the most sympathetic of the main characters. She seems to be in tune with the real world outside the secretive bubble of polygamy that she and her family live in, something that Bill is not so good at. Sure Bill tries, he wants the best for his family but as the seasons progress he becomes more and more self centred, claiming his own wants and needs to be for the good of the family. I used to understand why he was a douche but now he’s just being ridiculous. But it’s his hypocrisy, which is called out by his daughter Sarah (Amanda Seyfried) and most noticeably by his “4th wife” Ana (Branka Katic), that is just too much to handle. Everything is about him, he screws over his business partners (three of them), he cheats on his wives and he just becomes the biggest poon to roam the world of television.
Why do I keep watching you ask? I keep thinking it will get better, that he will see the light. I’ve also invested too much wasted time into the show not to waste anymore. Also, I watch it for the good times; Harry Dean Stanton, Mary Kay Place, Sissy Spacek, Melora Walters and my favourite good times:
Faces of Haggard Steel.
Yep, Bruce Dern as Bill’s shitbag father on the compound (basically the trailer park of Mormonism), Mireille Enos as Jodeen (and her twin sister Kathy), Bill’s father’s newest wife and Grace Zabriske (known best for starring in David Lynch’s mind) as Bill’s mother Lois. There are no better scenes than the ones where these three light it up, try to kill each other, smuggle birds, try to kill each other again and horrify yet arouse me at the same time. Another stand out who unfortunately is only in a handful of episodes is Sandy Martin as Selma Green, a compound crony wife of one of the Mormon mob bosses (none of this is cannon, I just assume Mormon mob boss to be his role). She dresses like a man, probably to be taken seriously by the ruling men around her, she is undoubtedly one fierce bitch.
Sandy Martin and Harry Dean Stanton being acting gangstahs.
So let’s sum everything up: Bill Henrickson, I have no sympathy for your fictional life because I kind of hate you but supporting cast are pretty hot ‘n’ fun.
mrsrobinsonanon 