Is Three Wives a Crowd?

By Kara Jesella, AlterNet. Posted March 10, 2006.

"Can he have sex with both of them at the same time?"

That's what my boyfriend asked midway through a screening of "Big Love," HBO's new drama about a polygamist family (the first episode premieres this Sunday, March 17, after "The Sopranos").

I'm not sure whether patriarch Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) can have multiple-partner rendezvous with his three wives, Barb (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), but based on the first episode, it looks like he doesn't. Except for the fact that he sleeps with a different woman every night, Bill seems as vanilla as can be.

Still, I don't think my boyfriend's question was just wishful thinking. Polygamy is pretty confusing to most monogamists. It seems like the creation of a bunch of sexist, scheming Utah Bible-thumpers who use the "word of the lord" as an excuse to keep harems of women at their beck and call as sexual playthings. Right?

Well, not exactly. Beyond the star-studded (but not overexposed) cast -- which also includes Harry Dean Stanton, Tina Majorino (the nerdy girl in "Napoleon Dynamite"), and Amanda Seyfried (one of the Plastics in "Mean Girls") -- and the fact that I'm riveted by most any show on HBO, the reason I wanted to see "Big Love" was because it promised a new twist on an old stereotype. According to the press release, the program tells the story of Bill's "balancing the needs of his three wives" -- a statement that gave me pause. You mean, Bill is concerned about their needs? How nice of him! (So, polygamy isn't just about what men want?)

In fact, the arrangement is stressful for everyone. This is made clear in the show's opening scene, in which Bill's bedroom encounter with Nicki ends in complete sexual frustration for both. This clearly isn't the first time -- and it won't be the last -- that Bill can't please his wives. As he moves from one house to the next (the women live next door to one another, and they switch off days with Bill), he disappoints each, in turn. And they are really, really disappointed. "Are you going to wear your pajamas to bed every night, or just on mine?" asks Barb. Margene cries; Nicki nags. Bill, our older, stressed-out, almost-every-husband hero, finally turns to Viagra.

HBO has become the go-to channel for family dramas that spotlight "alternative" relationships. At their best, the shows tell us something about all of our relationships. For instance, in "Entourage," a group of heterosexual, homosocial good-time guys live together in a uniquely 21st century arrangement -- what author Ethan Watters called an "urban tribe." And "Big Love" airs right after "the Sopranos," the drama about extended families that somehow doesn't feel far from our own experiences -- the adultery and divorces -- even if it is about mobsters.

So it makes sense that HBO wanted to give the same treatment to polygamy, a multiple-partner familial arrangement that, while rare (the Mormon Church banned it more than 100 years ago, but there are still anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 practitioners in the United States), has an outlaw ethos that is common in plenty of other experimental American couplings, from gay marriage to open relationships.

Kara Jesella is a freelance writer in New York City. She is currently co-writing a book on Sassy magazine for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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