Big Love

Big Love puts its weight on the strain of running a plural household, and that domestic pressure is what makes the drama work. By our assessment, it is effective when it treats secrecy, loyalty and the practical business of family life as a single knot instead of separate issues. The downside is that the premise can feel tight and stressful, because every scene has to feed the same arrangement. In practice the show lives on conversations, private compromises and the awkward logistics of who knows what and when. Against other HBO-style family dramas, it is more openly built around one unconventional setup, so the premise carries a lot of the load. The catalogue files Big Love under Drama, and that is exactly where its tension belongs.