Cheap Shots From HBO

Thank you HBO. You have now made introductions even more tiresome.

It started two weeks ago. Someone found out I was from Utah, so they immediately threw the "Are you Mormon?" question at me. Then there was a slight pause, followed by a question that totally threw me off: "So, what wife are you?" Obviously, it was all in jest. But after the third time I got the question, the joke wasn't doing it for me anymore.

There are obvious problems with this exchange-it always astounds me how quickly a seemingly polite person will drop all niceties to ask point-blank what religion I am after knowing me for all of five minutes-but those weren't what rattled me. Frankly, I'm used to responding with a quick "no" and then moving on. What got me was the realization that, in the grand tradition of taking on the mafia, funeral houses, and single life, HBO has taken on polygamy. And with its new show Big Love, it's quickly pushed the subject out from the shadowy area Utah likes to keep it in, and into a very real spotlight.

From what I've seen and heard of the show, the people at HBO are leaving nothing unsaid. They're tackling the most unsavory aspects of polygamy by taking you straight into a community deep in the south of Utah where polygamists really do live, a place where there is infighting, huge discrepancies in age between husbands and their wives, a strong distrust of any outsiders, and a stench of misogyny. But that isn't what's so shocking. After all, countless news shows have been into the area at least once since Tom Green (the creepy polygamist, not the creepy comedian) and Jon Krakauer helped to raise the issue again with their actions and book, respectively. What is so hard to grasp is that they're taking the unsavory issue of polygamy out of that easy-to-hate setting and placing it right smack in suburban Utah.

This is a setting based in reality-polygamy in Utah has never been solely confined to the rural south-but it's amazing how such a simple shift in setting allows them to break down stereotypes right and left. They've been able to quickly deal with aspects like the connection with the actual Latter-day Saints church (not such a good relationship, to put it lightly), the amount of tolerance Utah has for polygamy (surprisingly high), and the mind-set of the wives within the relationship by introducing such tried-and-trusted HBO themes as sex (read: the wives want a lot of loving). This should, in theory, produce a good show, and the only episode I've seen was well written and entertaining. But I couldn't wholly embrace it because I couldn't help but see through what they're doing: they're HBO-ifying the subject.

HBO takes the full name of the station (Home Box Office Entertainment, in case you were wondering) very seriously. It does not just bring movies into your home, it takes the very stuff of Hollywood and turns it into a TV series. The small screen has always been the place for less dramatic, more common, and, at least in theory, more realistic settings. What that has turned into, however, is a world in which only detectives, attorneys, doctors, quirky groups of twenty-somethings trying to figure out the real world, and quirky families exist.

Sometimes the networks switch it up a little, making shows about both doctors and quirky, bright-eyed twenty-somethings (Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs), or crime scene investigators who combine a little of the TV doctor's faux science with a lot of the role of the detective (has anyone else noticed that the CSI people seem to be doing an awful lot more crime-solving than, say, crime scene investigators in Law and Order?). But, for the most part, it's absolutely mind-boggling just how many different names networks think they can give to the same show without the public noticing. Did CBS really think that by not using CSI in the title and instead calling their new show Evidence we'd be so shocked that we'd come running?

HBO, instead, looks to the grand sort of subjects only movies use, like westerns, the mafia, and Hollywood itself. What always made its shows so good was that combination of a shocking subject matter with an original, intelligent treatment. HBO tends to fall into the same basic patterns with each show, namely examining the most mundane aspects of shocking characters, but until Big Love, I'd been able to pass it off. Every show up to this point either takes place in the distant past or on the East coast-places that are either one big stereotype (Rome, the Old West) or too well known to really turn into just another aspect of the show (Carrie Bradshaw's New York is obviously not the real city).

Big Love, however, is taking on what is an exotic place and subject for all too many people, and, by HBO-ifying the subject, it's risking doing two things. First, it's making polygamy seem kind of cute and acceptable (Jeanne Tripplehorn's character is a teacher and a strong woman! Even strong women like polygamy!). Secondly, it's making Utah seem like nothing more than a backdrop for the dysfunctional world of Big Love. It has gone almost too far this time, and become nothing more than a riskier major network. Its stereotypes may be bizarre ones, but with this show, that's all HBO is trafficking in.