Television: Take My Wives, Please

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Big Love is exciting and fascinating too. Beneath his bland exterior, Paxton subtly shows the pressures of trying to be the breadwinner of a '50s-style household (that would be the 1850s) in the 21st century. And the polygamist compound where Bill grew up keeps pulling him back, Corleone fashion, from the 'burbs, driving the plot in dark, gripping directions. Stanton is perfectly cast as the pious, menacing Roman, who insists on the cut from the second store, although, legally, Roman is an investor in only the first. "There's man's law, and there's God's law," he warns, before the Hummers of his henchmen start staking out Bill's house.

Secrets, threats, Viagra--Big Love was always going to be interesting TV, but what makes it first-rate drama is how confidently it moves past exoticism to the ordinary universals of family life. The big in the title, it turns out, refers to the expansiveness, not the number, of the Henricksons' commitments. You can analyze their intramarital alliances or disagree with their way of life, but you are never invited to laugh at them or doubt their sincerity. Right, wrong or just weird, they're a family, trying their hardest. Big love, the series shows, is ultimately about quality, not quantity.