Big Love turns 15

Paste Magazine

The Bill Paxton-led HBI drama about a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist family -- co-starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin as his wives -- premiered on HBO March 12, 2006, airing for five seasons. "Big Love was an awards darling that aired from March 2006 to March 2011, during HBO’s Golden Age of prestige programming (it premiered on the same night as the sixth season of the premium cabler’s more-or-less nominative series, The Sopranos). It helped launch the career of writers like Melanie Marnich, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and Dustin Lance Black, and cast actors like Aaron Paul, Mireille Enos, and Amanda Seyfried as their careers exploded," says Whitney Friedlander. "It was also a story of marriage and relationships that, in many ways, was no different than most stories about these topics (money, kids, crazy in-laws, work-life balance, etc., etc.). Bill, the self-made face of a Home Depot-like Utah hardware empire, has built three houses in a cul-de-sac. They seem perfectly normal from the outside, but connect in the back to make one united compound; a different take on the Brady Bunch melting pot family. That the show was also set around the illegal lifestyle of polygamy was a tongue-in-cheek we’re-not-so-different-you-and-I nod (the show was created by married couple Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer; members of one historically ostracized group writing about another one)."