Big love. Beautiful love. Bad love. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), the hero of the big-buzz HBO series, Big Love, knows them all. The series, which has its premiere tomorrow night following the opening episode of The Sopranos' sixth and final season, is about one American man's struggle to be a good father and husband -- multiplied by three.

Armed with his faith in the Lord, an overworked cellphone and a daily little blue Viagra pill, Bill stays married to three women, which means not only three times the sex, but three times the mortgages, cars, kids and in-laws.

The premise sounds titillating, but Big Love is aiming for something grander: The show is the heir apparent to HBO's other two critically acclaimed revisionist nuclear-family dramas, The Sopranos (89 Emmy nominations) and Six Feet Under (39 Emmy nods), both of which have challenged film's traditional reputation for being artistically superior to television.

Like the Soprano family, running its "waste disposal" business in New Jersey, or the Fishers, maintaining the family funeral business in Pasadena, Calif., Big Love adroitly mixes the banal and the bizarre. There are, in each of these series, Shakespearian echoes of a lineage that has been broken, and a fatalistic sense that the twining DNA chains are ladders of destiny. In each case, the producers and writers, playing to a liberal intellectual audience, peel back the pat conservative sticker "family values" to reveal a tangled reality underneath.

In an entertainment world where "edgy" is a marketing cliché, Big Love also aims for genuine political controversy. The show's creators, Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, who are gay Californians, are out to have some fun with the idea of alternative marriage in the heart of red-state America: Not only are foreign-terrorist fundamentalists multiple-marriage minded, so were the founders of America's only homegrown mass religion, Mormonism.

Mormons introduced polygamy to the U.S. in the early 19th century. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is also called, has formally disowned the practice for the past 116 years. Its 12 million, often wealthy, churchgoers voted 95-per-cent for George W. Bush in the last election. Members include such prominent politicians as Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and New Jersey Governor (and Republican presidential hopeful) Mitt Romney, whose father, George, a three-term governor from Michigan, was born into a polygamous community in Mexico.

Polygamy is still practised by somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 Americans, mostly Mormon fundamentalists in Utah and Arizona. The anti-polygamy activist group, Tapestry Against Polygamy (which has expressed concerns about Big Love), accuses polygamous communities of abusing women and children, and chides the Mormons for sending mixed signals on "plural marriage" and failing to do enough for polygamy's victims.

The church, after meetings with HBO executives, insisted that every episode of Big Love begin with a disclaimer declaring that Mormons are opposed to polygamy. The producers say they always intended to include such a disclaimer.

One of the keys to making the series work was the casting of the central character, who had to be a likeable, all-American guy. The easygoing Paxton is best known for parts in such blockbusters as True Lies and Apollo 13. He has won critical acclaim for smaller films, including his part as a sheriff in Carl Frankin's One False Move (1992), but more recently the 50-year-old began forging a new career as the respected director of two features, Frailty (2001) and the golf drama The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005). He says he never imagined that, at this stage, he'd be getting what he has called "the role of my life" on TV.

By the time his agent sent him a script for Big Love, Paxton thought he'd finally made the break from acting: "I thought that was it, baby. Directing just lit me on fire. I always thought I had the stuff, and I felt like I was emancipated. I was in Montreal in preproduction on The Greatest Game Ever Played. We were getting the casting together, counting down to shoot, and then I got this call from my agent," who said he had something he thought Paxton should seriously look at, and sent it by overnight post. He read it reluctantly, but after finishing the last page immediately made a call to meet with the show's creators.

Wife No. 1, named Barb, and played by Tripplehorn, is worldly and educated, a cancer survivor, and mother of two teenagers, "who plays queen," says Paxton, "to my king." Wife No. 2, Nicky (Sevigny) is a devout Mormon fundamentalist with a bad credit-card addiction. Wife No. 3, Margene (Walk The Line's Ginnifer Goodwin) is a frisky flibbertygibbet, who was previously Bill and Nicky's babysitter.

As well as the demands of the bedroom and the bank account, Bill has other problems: Nicky's sinister father (Harry Dean Stanton), an old-time Mormon fundamentalist known as the Prophet, demands a 15-per-cent tithe on all of Bill's earnings from his hardware business. Then there's the daily struggle to keep his home lives secret from his co-workers and neighbours.

The risqué domestic life that Paxton portrays onscreen is a boon to his real-life one. The actor's wife, Louise (who he says resembles Tripplehorn), is happy the series will allow him to be home with his family six months of the year, while still having the chance to direct his own movies.

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