Michele Hewitson: Playing happy families takes its toll

Polygamy can get a little messy for those involved.

Polygamy is boring, expensive and about as sexy as a bucket of dirty nappies. That seemed to be the premise of the opening scenes of the Big Love (tonight, 8.30, TV2) pilot last week.

Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) is a middle-class bloke chasing the American dream in a bland ol' Utah where you're judged on how your house looks from the street and what car you - and your wife - drive.

Bill is a blameless sort of guy, hard-working, who remembers to pick up the dry cleaning, who makes it home for family dinners and who is about to open his second store: Henrickson's Home Plus Home Improvement Store.

That's a clue, a not very subtle one, that while he's selling the things people just like him need to improve their lives, his life is about to start getting messy indeed.

His wife, one of his three wives, complains to her mother that "everything's so superficial fixing up your home and your car".

This is middle wife, Nicky (Chloe Sevigny) who is addicted to mail-order shopping. When the doorbell goes, she says to one of her kids, who is just learning to talk: "You know what that is?" "UPS," says the kid. "You're so clever," says mom.

Bill has the three wives, seven kids, a growing pile of bills he can't pay, and a problem with impotence.

He is also about to have a very big problem with the Prophet, Roman Grant, (Harry Dean Stanton) who is the leader of a bizarre compound where women and girls work in the fields in long skirts and buttoned-to-the-neck, long-sleeved blouses. The Prophet is after his share of Bill's business. The Prophet's guys have guns. The Prophet is not a friendly sort of polygamist.

Bill's family - his mother, father and brother - still live at the compound. And somebody is feeding his father arsenic. His mother, (Grace Zabriskie) a hard-bitten dame with a voice like a rusty handsaw and a temper, refused to let Bill take his father (Bruce Dern) to hospital. Bill prevailed but not before he walked in to find daddy collapsed on the floor. "He's better today," said mom. "He needs a doctor," said Bill. "No," said mom. "Remember when he got his fingers caught in the fan, you said he needed a doctor and he was fine."

"He needed 23 stitches," said Bill.

These guys are nuts. Well, of course they are: they're polygamists.

The compound polygamists are the real weirdos. Nicky's mother collects Lladro. Being married to a polygamist might do that to a woman.

The town polygamists are not weird. They're just like regular Middle Americans except that three wives share one man. And some tensions.

This is illegal, for one thing. But otherwise, it's pretty normal.

Nicky to Barb, Number One wife, about Number Three wife, Margie, who is having sex upstairs with Bill who has discovered Viagra: "Can you believe it? It's like a train whistle." Barb: "Do you have an extra dozen eggs?"

Polygamy isn't much fun for anyone. The wives have to be nice to Bill and are supposed to always be nice to each other. They are supposed to be perfect in that clean-living, house-proud, competitive Martha Stewart way. It's woman against woman.

There was a creepy little scene last week involving the newest wife of the Prophet, who is about 14. She asked Barb why she hadn't had any more children. Barb had had cancer, and a hysterectomy. She had also abandoned the True Faith. The child bride took a lipstick from her pocket, put it on slowly, and walked away. She announced, loud enough for Barb to hear, that she wouldn't get cancer. The child bride scene was creepy: Little House on Prairie with Lolita playing Laura.

So, polygamy is not boring. It promises to get much nastier than a mess of crappy nappies. No matter how many wives a man has, some woman's going to have to clean up.