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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?

This week in Creepy TV

When Star Jones clopped back onto the set of The View this week, admit it, we were all staring at her new breasts. And for that, I am very, very ashamed. And a little frightened. According to legend, if you stare directly at her breasts, you will turn into a big block of cheese. (I still can't look at her without thinking of a term I once heard: obesely gaunt.)

Shown on CNN and elsewhere, Justin Berry, main subject of a long NYT expose by Kurt Eichenwald, testified before a Congressional panel that he began taking off his clothes for Internet pedophiles and accepting gifts of cash from them when he was 13. At 19 the smoothly handsome kid spoke with little emotion about his descent into the world of underage porn. His father approved of his activity and encouraged it. Leading to yet another creepy moment--this time on Larry King Live, center of the cable creepy-TV universe-- as Larry asked Justin where his father was while he was getting hit on by pedophiles. Not two minutes later, Larry asked the same question again as though he had no memory of it. Very Uncle Junior, that Larry.

OK, is Lost all a product of the twisted mind of the fat guy? That's what might be inferred from this week's brain-boinking episode of the confounding ABC drama. He has an imaginary friend and more voices in his head than Roseanne Barr, but is it really just his dream? And in that dream does he meet a comatose Tony Soprano? Or Star Jones' old breasts?

Creepy-great title for this week's Sopranos: The Fleshy Part of the Thigh. Bobby gets 7 grand for popping an ambitious rapper in the rump with a bullet. But isn't that just a metaphor for finding the one spot that's vulnerable without being fatal?

Speaking of vulnerable, Paula Abdul seems on the verge of toppling over the same precipice Lost's fat guy was perched on. After Tuesday's live American Idol she reported to police that she'd received a "concussion" and other injuries at a party Sunday night. Is a convenient brain injury just another way to explain bonzo behavior? What was that again about moths and mushrooms?

Mandisa got the boot on AI and blessed us all in the name of Jesus. Now if only we could hook her up with all of Star Jones' old big-girl clothes, the circle would be complete.

K-k-k-Katie?

As they say in Dodgeball, "It's a three-player swing!" That's what happens with the move of Katie Couric from NBC's Today to CBS Evening News. Out goes old pro Bob Schieffer, who has grown the CBS newscast by 2 million viewers since Rather's departure. In comes Couric, never able to get one sentence through her dental work without fluffing at least two syllables --then excusing herself with a hoity-toity "Rah-ther...." The third player in the swing is, by all accounts Meredith Vieira, who jumps from the left chair on The View to the sofa on Today, where she'll have to stop talking about "going commando" lest Matt Lauer get the icks.

The critics have had their say about Couric's lack of "gravitas" (which sounds like very strong gravy) and how she'll be the first-ever solo woman anchor of network newscast. But isn't Elizabeth Vargas already doing that on ABC? (No word on when the injured Bob Woodruff will rejoin her.)

Couric alone probably can't make CBS Evening News No. 1. The nighttime newscasts have been losing viewers for a decade (here in Central Time they air at 5:30 p.m., before most grown-ups are home from work yet). And the always-chased younger demos get their news from the Internet and cable... if they look for news at all. She's not a strong reporter and at 49 she's losing that babe-o-liciousness that made her so tasty with a cup of kawfee in the a.m. Will they be hiding those fab gams under that desk? Or rebuilding a plexiglas display case for them the way ET once did for Mary Hart?

Such points to ponder. But consider the Vieira-Lauer anchor marriage for a moment. There's an old theory in filmmaking: Some stars are "reflectors"; others are "absorbers." The reflectors glow with a sort of inner light. They make the best heroes and heroines and are perceived by viewers as friendly and harmless. The absorbers are heavier. They balance the up-energy of the reflector and provide that yin-yang thing. Think Bogie and Bacall (absorber/reflector). Think Lucy and Desi (reflector/absorber). Now, Katie Couric is a klieg-light-sized reflector. Lauer was her darker absorber, the yang to her yin. Together they were perfectly balanced. Over on The View, Meredith Vieira is the absorber opposite Barbara Walters' considerable reflection. Alongside Lauer, however, Vieria will be dark against dark.

You can have two reflectors to make a hit. Or a reflector/absorber pairing. But two absorbers? Disaster. Flop city. Good Morning America has the reflective Diane Sawyer teamed with the absorber-anchor Charles Gibson. Watch their ratings go up after Couric takes her reflective stardom to CBS news.