Here's the skinny on a show I never thought I'd watch and definitely never thought I'd enjoy... but it's a spellbinding, ridiculous, wonderfully well-acted and scripted show that I would highly recommend, even for anyone who hasn't seen an episode before. The program is in the midst of Season 3 (Sunday nights, HBO, 9 pm), about four or five episodes in, and I myself only started watching at the start of this season, so if you had any interest at all, now's as good a time as any to jump right in. It really is excellent television.
The story is very, very complicated, but also kind of simple, and I've picked just about everything up already. It really wasn't that hard. Bill Paxton plays Bill, a polygamist living in Utah with three wives, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn (Tom Cruise's wife in The Firm) as Barb, Chloe Sevigny as Nikki, and some woman I don't know playing Marjorie. Barb is Bill's age and they have two teenage children and one around twelve (and maybe younger ones, but I don't know for sure, the younger kids aren't really ever shown). The teenage daughter is pregnant by her boyfriend, but she hasn't told her parents yet and her current (evolving) plan is to have the baby at Arizona State (where she's been accepted into college) so she can run away from her over controlling, psycho polygamist family. Except that her family isn't really that crazy at all -- it just has two extra wives -- and seems otherwise fairly "normal", at least for Mormons. Bill grew up on "The Compound," a hardcore polygamist cult like the ones you read about where old men have bunches of wives and impregnate teenage girls because they call themselves "Prophets" and basically propagate the seedy and rightfully illegal side of polygamy. But Bill has gone "straight" -- he was thrown off the compound as a teenager and remains estranged from his father, a sick fuck of an old man who was nearly killed by his wife (Bill's mother) with a shovel in an episode two weeks ago. And then she tried to choke him to death with a plastic bag but received a call from her son to interrupt the asphyxiation.
As awesome as that scene was, he did survive and Bill's mother is now hiding out in a motel in Bill's town -- which is in regular, Mitt Romney Mormon Utah, and Bill's own polygamy is held secret. Nikki, his second wife, also grew up on the compound, and her father is played by Harry Dean Stanton (Molly Ringwald's father in Pretty in Pink), who runs the Compound and is the "true" prophet. He's had bunches of wives, I think, and was in prison for the first four episodes for statutory rape and wrongful imprisonment of these young girls on the compound. Unfortunately for the State, the Prophet is quite powerful and was able to intimidate all the women who were going to testify against him, all but one -- Bill's sister-in-law. Nikki was working undercover in the prosecutor's office getting the names of the women who were testifying, since she is still loyal to the Compound and still dresses all conservative and uptight like them. So the Prophet got off and has now vowed revenge on all those who wronged him, including perhaps his son, Albie, who his mother attempted to murder via hitman in a bathroom where Albie was trying to solicit gay sex. Seriously, this show is totally like the Sopranos... just set in Utah. And all this has happened in just five episodes. There's so much going on, it's unbelievably gripping. It's like The Sopranos along with Desperate Housewives and about seven different soap operas all on one show. And I didn't even mention Anna, the FOURTH wife of Bill's, a woman from Serbia who Bill (and his wives) have "dated" this season, who agreed to marry him in last week's episode only to wise up a day after she moved in and realized there's no fucking way she could handle living with three other women fighting for her and Bill's attention. I mean, seriously, what exactly is the upside to polygamy? These women are nuts. I cheered out loud when Anna told Bill she was not donating her wages into the "family pool" of money. Even louder when she told Nikki to screw off. It's totally awesome. Run Anna run! But everyone else, watch this show.
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