Big Love: Season 2 (2007)

To me the most significant episode of the second season of HBO’s Big Love is episode number 11 "Take Me As I Am". Now this may not be the most interesting of the episodes in terms of its portrail of fundamentalists Mormons, or even in the dramatic or story arc sense, but I think it says the most about mainline Mormons we’ve seen this season.

In this episode Barb Henrickson attempts the delicate dance of a reconciliation with her mother, played by Ellen Burstyn in an Emmy worthy performance. Burstyn’s Nancy captures so much of a certain generation of Mormon women, I was nearly floored to see this type so fully realized on television. Mormons may say what they like about this program but the writers know us, they know who we are as a people and what we go through.

Nancy was of course deviated when she learned that her daughter Barbra was leaving the mainline LDS faithful to follow her husband Bill into polygamy. As if the prospect of her daughters apostasy for an ill-esteemed martial arrangement was not enough of a blow, it was brought about by Bill, the one time lost boy of polygamous parentage, whom Nancy and her late first husband had taken into there home as a teenager. Nancy simply could not coupe, a common enough reaction among any Mormon mother whose child leaves the fold, whether for polygamy, atheism, or some other religious affiliation. She cut of contact with her daughter because it just reminded her of her pain.

When Nancy got engaged to an old family friend Barb read about it in the newspaper and started a renewed effort to re-establish contact. She missed her mom and loved her, she felt betrayed that she would have to learn about as important an event as remarriage from the news. Barb also had other reasons for this reconciliation, she wanted her children to be exposed to more mainstream Mormon influences as she had always been torn, and never fully accepted, the change that fundamentalist Mormonism had brought to her family, and the effects it was having on her children, particularly her son who was becoming quite enamored of “The Principle”.
Eventually arrangements are made for Barb to bring her children to the wedding reception and for Ben (the son) to accompany the older couple on a honeymoon trip to Sun Valley. But Barb stays and tries to be a part of the gathering, which becomes all the more complicated with Bills later arrival at the reception.

It is during the reception scenes that we view this beautiful dance of two pained souls longing for reunion. Nancy is so hurt, and the quality of her voice just speaks volumes. We learn about her personal, potentially quiatoic quest to both obey and change the church to which she belongs. How here tolerance, though perhaps limited from outside perspectives, allowed her to invite an ill favored lesbian aunt to Thanksgiving dinners. How she turgid through more then forty years worth of a bad marriage because she believed in marriage, believed in family and believed in the Church. We see in Nancy the mainstream embodiment of what we see in the Hendrickson’s, that a demanding faith that can cost so much, can still be so central and so beloved, that a Mormon can not leave it. It is the cause of so many of there problems, yet also there balm of Gilded. This is an encapsulation of what I love about Big Love, it captures the beautiful and painful paradoxes of Mormonism, and is oddly the best and most honest depiction of the faith I have ever seen on television.