It stars Bill Paxton as the patriarch of a fundamentalist Mormon family in contemporary Utah that practices polygamy, with Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin portraying his wives.

It features key supporting performances from Amanda Seyfried, Grace Zabriskie, Daveigh Chase, Matt Ross, Mary Kay Place, Bruce Dern, Melora Walters, and Harry Dean Stanton.

[4] For acting, Chloë Sevigny won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in the series' third season, and Bill Paxton was nominated three times for his leading role.

[4] At the Emmys, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Mary Kay Place, and Sissy Spacek were all nominated for their recurring roles,[5] while series' creators Olsen and Scheffer won the Writers Guild of America Award for Television: Episodic Drama.

[11] The FLDS is one of the most prolific and well-known polygamist groups and identifies itself as the legitimate successor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which officially discontinued polygamy in 1890.

[12][13] Creators Olsen and Scheffer included a drive through the twin FLDS towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, as part of their research for the show.

In Sandy, Utah, fundamentalist Mormon Bill Henrickson practices a polygamous marriage with his three wives: Barbara "Barb", Nicolette "Nicki", and Margene "Margie".

Bill owns and operates Home Plus, a local hardware store chain which earns the family considerable income, and allows him to support his wives and their seven children.

Meanwhile, Bill and Barb's eldest children, Ben and Sarah, individually deal with maintaining a façade to conceal their parents' polygamous marriage from their peers and community.

Barb seeks independence by taking a job as a schoolteacher, while Nicki, a compulsive shopper, incurs nearly $60,000 in credit card debt, and Margie struggles to find footing in the family.

Roman is aided by his sociopathic teenage bride Rhonda Volmer, as well as his son (and Nicolette's elder brother) Alby, a closeted homosexual and ardent follower of the United Effort Brotherhood (UEB), the priesthood of Juniper Creek.

Sarah joins an ex-Mormon support group to voice her frustrations over her family life, and meets Scott, a twenty-something-year-old whom she begins dating.

Posing as Margie, Nicki takes a job at the district attorney's office to help pay off her credit card debts, meanwhile seeking the state's evidence against her father.

While cruising for sex at a rest stop, Alby is attacked by a stranger, and suspects Bill has put a hit on him, but it is revealed to be Adaleen, attempting to dissuade him of his same-sex attractions.

Bill takes in his younger half-brother, Frankie, who has been kicked out of Juniper Creek, and it is revealed that Nicki has been on birth control for several years; meanwhile, Sarah discovers she is pregnant with Scott's child.

Nicki takes in Cara Lynn, her daughter from a previous arranged marriage on the compound who has been raised by her father, J.J. (brother of Wanda) in Kansas.

After his election, Bill establishes his own church in Sandy, and seeks to reform the Juniper Creek compound and dismantle the UEB against Alby's wishes.

As Bill's potential trial looms, Barb decides to join the reform-LDS church, and Margie considers making a mission to South America, leaving Nicki fearful she will be left alone.

"[45] The second season was cited among the best shows of 2007 by numerous publications, including PopMatters,[46] the San Francisco Chronicle,[47] Time,[48] Entertainment Weekly[49] and NPR.

Notably, Tim Stack of Entertainment Weekly gave the season's early episodes an 'A' grade, and Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times said, "If there's a better written, better acted, more originally conceived show on television, I defy you to name it.

Mary McNamara wrote, "Big Love quickly reclaims its astonishing ability to balance the insightful and the absurd, hilarity and heartbreak and the personal with the political.

[59] Overall, the final season of Big Love tied as the fourth-best reviewed returning show of 2011, trailing only Breaking Bad, Louie and the animated comedy Archer.

"[62] Mary McNamara, of the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "a perfect finish to an astonishingly ambitious show that often careened through genre, narrative structure and believability like they were false walls on a stage".

[66] Among other things, the church stated, "Despite its popularity with some, much of today's television entertainment shows an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, coarse humor and foul language.

In her conclusion, she wrote "the future of feminist legal theory depends on its ability to remain ambivalent about the tensions presented in the consent doctrine as applied to contexts such as polygamy, prostitution, sadomasochistic sex, obscenity, and domestic violence.

"[7] For the Columbia Law Review, Dr. Adrienne D. Davis assessed legal debates surrounding polygamy after the premiere of Big Love and how it was being likened to same-sex marriage.

Ultimately, she argues that the dichotomy presented by Big Love works when viewed in terms of "intimacy liberty, privacy, autonomy, and agency, or even an incipient constitutional respect for 'sexual minorities.

In fact, he somewhat rebuffs earlier assertions made: "The attention that is paid to the minute details of Mormon ritual, theology, and historical disputes demonstrates that HBO's writers are uncomfortable with the supposed dichotomy that constructs homosexuality as by default areligious."

Atkinson focuses on the ending, interpreting Barb's blessing of Bill as a "ritual innovation [that] indicates that FLDS Mormonism must shed the trappings of patriarchy if it wants to legitimate polygamy in a post-feminist society", and the fall of Alby, the closet homosexual, as a powerful interpretation of "the future theo-political and sexual tensions that Mormonism, and by extension, the broader American polity, will face as the post-secular matures".

In concluding, Atkinson makes the case that Big Love and other HBO shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under "contribute to a fuller conception of humanity" than other forms of art and entertainment.