The more, the scarier

BY GLENN GARVIN

ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

• Big Love, series premiere, 10-11 tonight, HBO

Up yours, Malvina Edwards. That record you made about the suburbs where the houses and the people inside them were all made of ticky-tacky and all looked just the same is officially refuted. We've had gangsters in the 'burbs (The Sopranos), dope-dealing soccer moms in the 'burbs (Weeds) and drunken adulteress murderers in the 'burbs (Desperate Housewives). Now, with Big Love, we have oversexed polygamists in the 'burbs. All of America will shortly be moving to the inner city just to get some peace and quiet.

Also officially refuted are several jillion male fantasies about harems. Watching Bill Paxton (Twister) as the triply henpecked Bill Henrickson, a jackleg Mormon heading three side-by-side households in the Salt Lake City version of Wisteria Lane, is enough to turn even the randiest male adventurer into a monogamist fanatic.

His life is a shrill cacophony of carping women, puking children and eternally ringing cellphones. One of the wives is always trying to score a new car or an extra roll in the hay. Sex, by the way, is less a fevered porn dream than a job; Bill has to resort to Viagra just to keep up. And pillow talk is as delicately composed as a State Department demarche. ''Officially, I miss you guys all the same,'' Bill carefully replies to a wife who wonders if he ever thinks about her on their off nights.

Big Love is more than just Please Don't Eat The Daisies on steroids, though. Bill is a refugee from a renegade Mormon sect headquartered in a remote mountain site ominously known as The Compound. There, polygamy is not hectic but sinister. ''The seediness, the corruption, old men preying on young helpless girls,'' broods Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Basic Instinct), Bill's No. 1 wife. ``Prophets? Try con artists -- all of them, I swear.''

Unhappily, Bill hasn't been able to cut all his ties to The Compound. Not only is Roman, the head of the sect (played by Harry Dean Stanton, looking creepier than ever), his father-in-law, but The Compound is a secret investor in his chain of home improvement stores. And a buyout is not an option. ''There's man's law,'' warns Roman, ``and there's God's law.''

Trying to build a series around a social practice that's one of the most reviled in America is a bold task, but Big Love seems up to it. The talented cast -- which also includes Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don't Cry) and Ginnifer Goodwin (Ed) as Bill's other wives and Amanda Seyfried (Veronica Mars) as his teenage daughter Sarah, who must endure taunts of ''total Morm'' and ``Mormbot) from the kids at the burger joint where she works -- lends impressive weight to writing that starts slowly but steadily gains power.

Big Love also gets a boost from its very strangeness. Whatever you think of the show, it's certainly not just one more ripoff of Friends or CSI. To hear a friend of Bill's discuss adding another wife to the family as if he was thinking of installing a swimming pool is a jarring -- and thought-provoking -- experience.

And then there's the bizarre contrast between Big Love's frequent and graphic depictions of sexual behavior, and the Leave-it-to-Beaver language of its deeply religious characters. When's the last time you heard somebody snarl, ''Dumbhead!'' or exclaim, ``Oh, my heck!''

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