Big Love is anomaly among HBO shows, in that it avoids the obligatory nudity and rarely utters a curse stronger than “G.D.” With these self-imposed restrictions, the series has to find subtler ways of providing its shocks. Sunday’s episode, “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.,” boasted two jolts—mouth-to-mouth scandals that touched on the series’ interlocking themes of the sacred and the profane. In the first, Rhonda’s scruffy husband Verlan had an inspiration for staying on Albie Grant’s payroll: by giving the UEB’s secretly gay prophet a big surprise kiss. Over at Bill’s church, the New Assembly of Mormon Pioneers, his first wife Barb declined to take communion. She simply whispered, “No, thank you,” but her refusal carried the seismic impact of a bathtub decapitation on The Sopranos.
As a film critic who moonlights on this blog when its esteemed proprietor, Jim Poniewozik, takes the occasional vacation, I’m alert to the major difference between the characters in movies and longform TV series. One group is a bunch of strangers you watch come and go in a couple of hours; the other is a family who moves into your home. For five years and 49 episodes, the Henricksens have resided in the spare bedrooms of our minds. And now that we know they’ll be moving out in another month, we sense an urgency to their disputes.
