Big hugs for HBO's Big Love

Like a polygamist with many wives, we who are married to HBO on Sunday nights remain most loyal to the one that first got us to the chapel, The Sopranos. And we'll dance with Tony, Carmela, Uncle Joon and the rest until the very end.

But this week HBO's new second half of the Sunday night series double feature, Big Love, was so good it is threatening to steal our hearts. It's taken a few weeks to get up to speed and to lay out its intricate storylines about renegade Utah Mormons engaging in "plural marriage," but this series' latest installment seemed to take on a whole Twin Peaks-y tone that really makes it snap, crackle and pop. We're hooked.

Acting-wise, it's first rate. Series star Bill Paxton plays best to the exhausting aspects of being a husband to three wives whose personal quirks and voracious sexual appetites make the gals of Wisteria Lane look like ladies who lunch. When he's not popping Viagra, he's on the phone to the drugstore re-upping his prescription.

His wives are happiest when he's shtupping them on schedule (shtupping being the Mormon slang word for coital union). As Barbara, the first wife the other two call "boss lady," Jeannie Tripplehorn oozes confidence and womanly maturity. Paxton's character, Bob Henrickson, owner of two home improvement stores, gets turned on just watching her pack lunches for their herd of children. Soon he's packing her off to the nearest no-tell motel for lunchtime quickies, drawing suspicions from Wife No. 2, shopping addict Nicky (Chloe Sevigny), that he's shopping for Wife No. 4. Young wife 3, babyfaced Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), feels left out of almost everything. She bursts into tears as she unpacks her old high school yearbooks, realizing her only friends are her squalling infants, her mostly absent hubby and her two dominant "sister wives."

This week's episode introduced a handful of threats to the Henricksons' unorthodox marital bliss. There's the "junior bookkeeper" at Bob's store who rats out a co-worker she suspects is practicing polygamy (it is illegal). And the new neighbor across the street from Bob and his three families who befriends the vulnerable Margene, who's dying to spill family secrets. Then there's Utah's "polygamy czar," eager to follow up on the anonymous tips Bob is feeding him to try to topple the greedy leader of the renegade sect, who just happens to be his seedy father-in-law (Harry Dean Stanton). Oh, and Nicky's knocked up, adding yet another mouth for Bob to feed.

What is making Big Love so appealing is what it has in common with its lead-in, The Sopranos. Through terrific writing and acting, we viewers get to play voyeurs into subcultures that are both alien and strangely familiar. One lives in New Jersey and one in Utah. Each speaks its own language and adheres to its own unique and exclusive code of behavior and beliefs. But the fine storytelling of these series makes us believe that we know people just like the Sopranos and the Henricksons. We all have crazy families, don't we?