I don’t think I’m alone in trying to fill the Succession-shaped hole in my life since the show ended last year. I worked my way through some of HBO’s other tentpoles, like The Sopranos (meh; please don’t yell at me), Deadwood (Luke was right that I shouldn’t have watched the movie), and yet another run through The Leftovers. Recently, I watched all five seasons of Big Love, a show about a polygamist family in Utah that ran from 2006 to 2011.
I was surprised that Big Love mostly predates Sister Wives, a polygamist reality show on HBO sister network TLC that started its 19th season last weekend, just as I finished my Big Love watch. Big Love stars the fictional Henrickson family: husband Bill; first and “public” wife Barb; second wife Nikki, a daughter of the head of the abusive polygamist compound Bill grew up on and was expelled from; and third and youngest wife Margene. Sister Wives husband Kody Brown has said he’s aware of and can relate to Big Love, but that seems to be where the overlap ends. Both shows explore how people live their unusual faith together, but they do so in unexpectedly different ways.
Big Love had five seasons. Here’s a video from HBO recapping seasons one through four; I’ll be honest I don’t know how to deal with spoiler warnings for a show that’s been off the air for 13 years, but proceed at your own risk.
The major tension for much of Big Love is that the Henricksons will be found out for being polygamist and incur the wrath of their community and the mainstream LDS (Latter Day Saints, or, contentiously, Mormon) church, which decries polygamy in its history and the satellite faiths that exist today. Alongside that, the Henricksons have familial tensions: Nikki’s continued relationship to the compound, Margene’s efforts to make friends and find herself, Barb coming to chafe against the demands and constraints of their way of life. You’d think all that would be more than enough fodder for a show, but Big Love isn’t content to stay in the family lane, sprawling out into plotlines that sometimes stretch the bounds of believability. There’s drama at Bill’s home goods stores. The family tries to open a Mormon-friendly casino. People poison and bludgeon and shoot each other. There’s a big trial and a federal investigation and interference in the investigation. There’s a kidnapping and rescue mission. There’s medical experimentation. There’s underage marriage. (It’s worth noting that the show ran at the height of attention paid to FLDS, or Fundamentalist LDS, leader Warren Jeffs, whom the compound plotlines feel clearly inspired by.) It’s hard to tell if the show wants to be a domestic drama or some kind of thriller, and it careens wildly in ways that are exciting, but also make it hard to know what kind of show it is.
A friend of mine suggested seeing Big Love as a sitcom rather than a prestige show. Kody Brown called it “a soap opera.” I think both these definitions are pretty accurate: It has great fundamentals in terms of a cast of characters with strong identities and goals, but at the end of every episode and every season, they basically stay the same. The later seasons attempt to create some movement, and do to an extent, but the characters felt like they always fell back into their roles, rather than growing in the way you’d expect in a prestige drama.
The most intriguing thing I found about the show was how sympathetic it is to polygamy while also making it seem so utterly unappealing. Despite how often the family insists they love each other, and how much Bill bangs on about his commitment to his family and the principle of plural marriage, the family is mostly a site for narrative conflict rather than genuine love. The cast is full of children who basically exist to be sent out of the room. The wives clash over and grapple with the logistics of their lives–the finances, the scheduling–but the show doesn’t dwell too much on how it would actually feel to be in a marriage that requires weekly meetings. I frequently wondered why the family didn’t just break up. (I should point out that other viewers don't share my view of this.)
But at the same time, Big Love casts the Henricksons as bold, faithful outsiders. They’re fighting the good fight to protect their family and their version of polygamy against the secular world’s misconceptions and the compound’s abuses, down to stirring speeches to the government and the public. The show seems to want you to root for them and, by extension, polygamy, but it’s also careful not to express any positive feelings about polygamy or show it in a positive light. In one way this gives you space to draw your own conclusions, but in another it feels like it just keeps everything at a remove.
I can’t figure out if I actually liked the show, even though I watched it all. You might know I have an interest in religion and especially cults or smaller faiths, and how they’re portrayed in media. As such, Big Love’s exploration of tensions between the LDS church and the Henricksons, and the Henricksons and the compound, were fascinating to me, being so specific to a certain corner of religion that often gets painted with an overly-broad or slanted brush. I was watching it alongside the height of attention to trad wife influencer Nara Smith, and every time I saw someone on social media “uncover” that she’s Mormon, I had to resist the urge to tweet Yeah, sometimes people are just Mormons, it’s not a gotcha.
Big Love takes my unsent tweets a step further by saying yeah, sometimes those people are even just polygamists, and in doing so, it does something really interesting with how religion gets talked about on TV. By taking the Henricksons’ family and faith as givens more than subjects in themselves, it can go to these weird and dramatic and sometimes unbelievable places instead of spending time defending its core premise. It doesn’t have to have plots about being a sister wife; it can have plots about sister wives smuggling exotic birds. In some ways, I’m kind of excited about how disappointed I felt in the show’s emotional distance–in wishing it had more feeling, in wishing it delved more deeply into the felt experience of its characters’ faith, that meant it wasn’t holding religion up as an oddity to be gawked at.
This is very different from Sister Wives, which at its start at least clearly wanted you to watch the oddballs. Starting in 2010, Sister Wives follows a real polygamist family, the Browns, with husband Kody already in a relationship with wives Meri, Janelle, and Christine. When it began, they were just considering adding fourth wife Robin; in the latest season, Robin is the only wife left, with all the others having left Kody or, in Meri’s case, a decision somewhere between mutual and Kody dumping her. The entire premise has changed so much that, while watching the opening credits, I wondered if the show should still even be called Sister Wives.
Everyone on the show has different explanations for why the family broke down. I don’t think I’m the only viewer who would chalk it up to Kody: while it was easy to look askance at his ego and generally conservative worldview and the whole structure of the family with the man at the head, in the show’s earliest days he seemed to truly love his family and respect his wives. But covid, Trumpian politics, and most likely the effects of being on TV for so long clearly took their toll on him. He was never a “great” guy by my standards, but the way he’s become demanding and cruel and subsequently driven so much of his family away can be genuinely hard to watch.
When Sister Wives started, it felt kind of revelatory to me as a portrayal of an unusual religion. Since their unique family and how it differs from the viewers’ was the whole reason the Browns were on TV, the show focused at length on the logistics of that family, how everyone feels and how their needs get met. As such, it didn’t steer clear of showing people really wrangling with living their faith. I was impressed by how this showed the family as intentional and thoughtful about their relationships and their connection to their religious beliefs. Even when I wanted to yell “Queer people have already thought of this; read a book!” at my TV when the Browns faced domestic struggles, I thought there was a lot of value in showing the messy but loving reality (or “reality”) of their religious family at work.
And though it feels voyeuristic, it’s even fascinating to watch their family breaking apart. What does it mean to get divorced within a cosmology that holds family as eternal; what does it mean to get divorced when you aren’t legally married, or when you’re married in a spiritual sense? It’s been interesting to watch the sister wives try to figure out if they’re still family without their relationship to Kody binding them; in the latest episode, Christine says that she and Janelle have a “sister wife family,” while other wives have less close relationships. It’s tough to watch Robin support Kody through multiple simultaneous divorces while she’s still married to him, and tragic to watch her grieve losing the family full of other wives that she joined the Browns for, a struggle so unique to their faith.
Lest this sound like Sister Wives is some masterpiece of television, it’s still an essentially trashy reality TV show. I fell off it for a long time when I didn’t have access to TV; when I came back recently, I was frustrated with how it’s grown slow-moving and repetitively structured and years behind. I sort of hope for everyone’s sake that the show ends soon, though I’m sure there are contracts and the cast’s financial situations to think of. After so long and so much, it’s probably time for the Browns to live their lives offscreen.
Sister Wives does the opposite thing as Big Love, which, by not focusing too hard on the family, doesn’t take a stance on polygamy. By showing polygamy as abnormal and focusing all its attention on why and how, Sister Wives, or at least its earlier seasons, ran the risk of making the Browns’ faith and way of life seem too appealing. But this is also, strangely, TLC’s MO, given the network’s weird obsession with fundamentalist and conservative religions; this is the network that laundered the Duggars’ abuses and papered over the harms of the Quiverfull movement, performing what a 2015 Buzzfeed article calls “fundamentalism as kitsch.” Like the Henricksons, in early Sister Wives episodes the Browns make it clear they aren’t FLDS, but the show is still ultimately glossing over the more challenging parts of the Browns’ faith. And all this is to say nothing of the idea of kids growing up on reality TV at all, and the harms that surely causes.
(If you’re interested in fundamentalism and reality TV, allow me to recommend the excellent YouTube channel Fundie Fridays. Also, if you know anything but why the hell TLC is like this, please let me know.)
I would have expected the shows to do the opposite of what they do with where they place their specific faiths in relation to the viewer. I’d think Big Love, with a room full of fiction writers unbound by reality, would have more space to explore the emotional landscape of polygamy. And I’d have thought that Sister Wives, with its interest in what makes the Browns unusual, would spend more time highlighting the ways they clash with the outside world. But the shows instead trade places.
I’m obviously torn on whether either show is “good” or if I’d recommend them. And I’m not an expert in Mormonism or its offshoots, though I know some smart folks who are. But the timing that led me to watch the two shows so close together let me see them as on something of the same project, doing different things with how media can feel religious.
