Also, he's a polygamist.
That much, I'm sure everyone has gleaned from the show's publicity: Bill is married to Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nikki (Chloë Sevigny), and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), with whom he has seven children and one more (at the end of season one) on the way. The three wives each have their own house, which all share a common backyard. Bill divides his nights between them, and they all eat meals as one family.
The brilliance of Big Love is the way in which it builds our sympathy for Bill and his family, and establishes the anti-polygamist Mormons as bigoted and narrow-minded. Bill and Barb et al live modern lives in beautiful homes with all the amenities of the twenty-first century, lives set in contradistinction to the Mormon fundamentalist polygamist community headed by patriarch and "prophet" Roman Grant, played with chilling sleaze by the ever-amazing Harry Dean Stanton. The traditionalists live veritable premodern lives on the "Compound," a dusty and ramshackle sprawl set well apart from the Utah suburbs Bill inhabits.
The creepy, cultish fundamentalists, from whom Bill can never entirely disassociate himself (second wife Nikki is Roman's daughter), provide an ever-present reminder of the inescapably misogynistic and exploitative nature of polygamy. When we first meet Roman, he has just affianced himself to his umpteenth wife Rhonda, a fifteen-year old who seems serenely blissful at the prospect of marrying the septuagenarian "prophet." That Roman takes it as his god-given due to exploit Rhonda's obvious youth and naïvety makes the skin crawl, but then we also realize that Margene, Bill's youngest wife, is little more than a teenager herself, and is as slavishly devoted to Bill as the women of the Compound are to Roman and the principle of plural marriage.
At any rate, I've watched season one and am into season two. In my general sketch for a book about HBO, I have a chapter titled "Family Dramas," and vague notes about focussing the chapter on The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Big Love. As is the nature of such outlines, I had little idea what I wanted to write when I jotted it down—but it seemed appropriate to talk at some length about those series and their subversion of the American nuclear family mythos.
One season into Big Love, I'm starting to get some traction, though I'm a ways off from putting together anything of substance. The starting point I'm currently working from is the way in which television has influenced and indeed facilitated the popular conception of the nuclear family. Though American conservatives tend to root many of their arguments against such bêtes noir as gay marriage in their assumption of the nuclear family's innate naturalness, it is in fact a relatively recent concept. The "nuclear family" became a normative concept during the early years of the Cold War, concomitant with the growth of suburbia and television's rise to prominence as the primary medium of entertainment (a rise itself facilitated by a newly affluent white collar suburban middle class, who bought television sets at an exponential rate in the mid-late 1950s).
So without belabouring my point (which is itself admittedly somewhat speculative until I manage do some proper research on it), our popular conceptions of "family" owe as much to television as anything else. And HBO's family dramas offer trenchant critiques of blah blah blah, etc.
ANYWAY ... that being said, what I'm finding interesting right now is that the genre of "family drama" is actually quite rare on television. There really haven't been all that many. Seriously—think about it for a moment and try to come up with a list of one-hour dramas that have focused primarily on one or more families. It's a more difficult question that you would initially think, isn't it?
Now take a moment and list all of the television comedies about family you can think of. Ah, there we are! Perhaps the question should be to try thinking of all the sitcoms not about family in one fashion or another. Even when they're not focused on biological families per se, sitcoms are almost invariably about families of different stripes—be they the friendships of Friends, the barflies of Cheers, or the workplace families of a host of other shows.
So here's my two-part question to my small but devoted readership: (1) What one-hour family dramas can you think of? (2) What gives? Why is comedy the primary medium for investigating family relationships?