I've been thinking a lot about the TV show "Big Love," which sounds really dorky--a soap opera-ish hour about a bunch of Mormon polygamists who one would imagine must be pretty boring. Or simply creepy--all those child brides being transported from one sealed compound to another.
But this show does a good job of making Mormon polygamy seem, well, normal. Sure, the family has three moms and only one dad. But they're are all pretty likable, except wife number two, Nicki, who is kind of borderline, but only because her father, the Prophet, put her into one of the Joy Books when she was probably around fourteen and some old guy she didn't know found her there and married her, and she had a daughter she abandoned and never told anyone about including her husband, Bill and her sister wives.
Bill pursues wealth like his salvation depended on it, which is its own kind of vice, and he tries really hard to make everyone happy. He even has to take Viagra to make everyone happy. It doesn't work, though, because when Nicky learns that he needs Viagra to even think about making her happy she gets really really unhappy. That fight gets displaced though by the fight over Nicky's birth control pills and that fight stops because of their eldest daughter's miscarriage which is really really bad because she isn't married.
Whew! I guess when you take the usual forms of vice out of the picture, as the Mormons have tried to do, you have to make do with money and sex. Unless you live on one of the compounds, and then, according to this show, it's sex and murder, sex and child rape, sex and forced marriage, sex and forgery, sex and (for something completely different) gay sex.
I really like it though that Bill decides to declare his family its own church and give everybody communion with pieces of Wonder Bread and water, under the stars by the swimming pool.
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