Big Love vs Trigonometry: A Thematic Comparison

 Introduction and Big Love:

About a year ago, my family got HBO Max and I started watching a bunch of HBO shows I’d never seen before. A lot of them were shows like The Sopranos, which had been upheld as one of the greatest pieces of American television of all time; or more experimental, creative pieces like Snowpiercer. But there was one I was drawn to not because of its reputation or ingenious premise, but because of my morbid fascination with the setting. 

That show was HBO’s Big Love. 

For those unfamiliar, this show is set in Salt Lake City, Utah. Salt Lake City is well-known for having the largest number of Mormons in a state already filled with them; in fact, it's even the city where the Mormon church is based. (Oh, wait, I’m sorry, it’s the city where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is based. My bad.) Mormonism is a splinter religion of Christianity founded in the 19th century by Joseph Smith, a conman who (allegedly under divine inspiration) wrote a scripture called The Book of Mormon. 

Nowadays, Mormons are most well-known for their missionaries; their political and cultural presence in Utah; and for having a doctrine that forbids swearing, drinking coffee, drinking tea, drinking alcohol, premarital sex, gay marriage, and—if we’re all being perfectly honest—rational thought. In pop culture, they are usually well-known because of the South Park episode about them and the Book of Mormon musical written by the same people. 

Mormons have a documented history of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, covering up sexual abuse, and using culty tactics (look up the BITE model if you’re curious). Much of that is on display in the show, but I know all of this firsthand because I was raised in the religion, and I left when I was 18. One thing I was shocked to learn about is that Joseph Smith used his status to coerce 33 women into marrying him, many of whom were already married or were underage. The youngest of his wives was 14. When a reporter tried to write an expose about Smith’s polygamous marriages, Smith sent a mob to destroy the man’s printing press and livelihood. This ultimately got Smith sent to prison. He smuggled a gun into prison, and during a botched escape attempt, he was killed.

Throughout the United States, Mormons are often seen as “out there” due to their stringent, fringe lifestyle and beliefs. The exception is in Utah. In Utah, where Mormonism makes up most of the population the only fringe group is the Fundamentalist Mormons, who still illegally practice polygamy in honor of Joseph Smith. 

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Big Love predates South Park and the Book of Mormon musical, but to this day it remains the most interesting, in-depth and emotionally compelling show about Mormonism.

The show was not written with the intention of mocking Mormons, appeasing them, or trying to do something in-between. No, Big Love succeeds because it makes the ugliness of Mormons its biggest storytelling asset. Joseph Smith’s illegal, polygamous exploits and the dark legacy its left on Utah are the focus of the whole show. 

Our main character is Bill Hendrickson, a Utah businessman who hides a dark secret. In a monogamous culture, he has three wives: Barb is the first and only legal wife, as well as more feminist than the rest; Nicki is the selfish second wife, who also nursed Barb back to health when she was sick; and Margie is the youngest, who started off as a babysitter before becoming the third wife. 

This is admittedly just the tip of the iceberg, and the show takes full advantage of the polygamist premise to inject as much drama into the story as possible. Nicki’s father is a Fundamentalist “prophet,” and he and Bill are former business partners despite having a massive grudge. Nicki’s brother is a closeted gay man and enforcer of said prophet, who tries to intimidate both of Bill’s oldest children (Sarah and Ben), who themselves are rebelling from the church in completely different ways. Ben is also in love with Margie, his (step?)mother; but he later shifts his interest to dating two twins simultaneously, and when Barb’s monogamist family hears of this, they desperately try to act as good influences to prevent Ben from becoming polygamist. You get the idea, this is a show with a lot going on. 

In many ways, Big Love is a show that could have only succeeded on its network. HBO is known for crafting extremely intricate stories about entire subcultures of society, whether it be the Westeros royalty of Game of Thrones, the mafia subculture of Sopranos, the animatronics of Westworld, or the upper-cart elitists of Snowpiercer. Oftentimes, we’re not meant to like the characters at the center of things—and if we do, we’re not meant to support what they’re doing. 

Crafting a massive, dense show focused on just one niche religion—but where everyone is varying degrees of that religion—is the sort of thing only HBO could have done. It’s probably why Big Love is still the #1 show I turn to in order to explain facets of Mormon culture to my friends. (And why the Mormon church had such a negative reaction to the show’s airing, because even though the show isn’t strictly about them, it does display the ugliness of both mainstream and fundamental Mormonism.) 

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Big Love paints an incredibly nuanced portrayal of Mormon culture. In lots of stories where religion is the focus, friction tends to arise between people within and outside of the religion. If the story is about a real-world religion known for shaming and banishing nonbelievers (such as Mormonism), this is even more likely to be the case. So it would be easy to go into Big Love thinking the show will ultimately boil down to a conflict between Mormons against Ex-Mormons. 

But the show adds a new twist with the Fundamentalist Mormons. Now, we’re presented with a third faction that takes the ideals of Mormonism (and all the bad that comes with that) even further. Just as Mormons tend to be social outcasts outside of Utah, Fundamentalist Mormons are social outcasts in Utah for believing in the original doctrine too much, and non-Mormons are social outcasts in Utah for not believing at all. 

This three-way cultural dynamic forms the backbone of Big Love. One of Big Love’s primary themes is community, yet the irony is that our main protagonists are all living in the gray area between communities. The Hendrickson family has the basic beliefs of polygamy that characterize Fundamentalist Mormons. On the other hand, their lifestyle is closer to that of mainstream Mormons. But because they haven’t been going to church anymore, all of their community thinks they are Ex-Mormons. 

A lot of the most compelling storylines deal with this friction in some way, with each member of the family trying to figure out which “group” they fit into. 

• Sarah was always skeptical of Fundamentalist Mormonism, and she eventually decides to reject both it and mainstream Mormonism, joining an Ex-Mormon group. Here, she meets her boyfriend, Scott. 

• Barb feels dissatisfied with polygamy. She’s from a Mormon family, and while initially hesitant to let Nicki and Margie come into the family, she ultimately agreed because cancer rendered her infertile and she wanted more kids. (If that sounds extreme, remember, we are talking about Mormons here.) Now that she has her bearings and is feeling more confident about herself, she’s torn between the love she has for her larger family and the dissatisfaction she has with sharing her husband. 

• Margie struggles with this “outsider” feeling the most. She was never even raised Mormon and moved to Utah as a Non-Mormon, so she already felt ostracized in that regard; and now she can’t even share details about her marriage. Considering Utah’s taboos against premarital sex, divorce and single mothers, this makes her predicament particularly difficult. 

• Ben ultimately adheres to mainstream Mormonism the most (he turns to his old bishop for advice on one occasion rather than his parents), but he breaks some of their lifestyle rules, such as premarital sex. He also keeps Fundamentalist Mormonism and polygamy in the back of his head as a “backup plan.” This creates noticeable conflict with his Non-Mormon girlfriend Brin, and Barb’s traditionally Mormon parents. 

• Nicki was raised with an amount of brainwashing, sexism and shaming that makes everyone else’s head spin. As the offspring of a modern prophet, Nicki suffers from entitlement, narcissism and a self-centered worldview; but as a woman, she also feels trapped by rigid gender norms. This leads to a bizarre situation, where she views herself as both special because of her upbringing and also inferior because of her gender. She begins the show as too conservative for the rest of her family, but once she develops her own identity, she also becomes too liberal for them in some ways (such as not wanting to be a mother and secretly using birth control). 

Ironically, the only main character who isn’t insecure in his role is, well, our protagonist Bill. But this makes sense: he’s a chauvinist living between mainstream Mormonism and extremist Mormonism, both of which are highly patriarchal religions where men benefit overwhelmingly compared to women. In fact, the lack of insecurity he feels causes just as much conflict as anything else, because he can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t believe in the same things he does. 

Trigonometry, and Healthier Polyamory: 

Like I said, Big Love gave me a lot of enjoyment. As an ex-Mormon with a lot of trauma from that religion, it gave me closure. I was worried I’d end up with a show that sugarcoated both mainstream and Fundamentalist Mormon culture, and I was pleasantly satisfied once I realized that the showrunners had every intention of portraying the ugliness of Salt Lake. 

However, because Big Love is so frank with its message, it also left me craving something…more. I’ve long since been a supporter of polyamorous relationships and having multiple partners, and while Big Love does a fine job of showing that such relationships can exist, I found myself constantly cringing at the chauvinism that colored every interaction between Bill and his wives. Luckily, the show is self-aware of this: when Bill tries to court a Serbian immigrant named Ana, she’s appalled at the hypocrisy and misogyny of Mormonism. 

I came away from Big Love satisfied, but needing more. I wanted a depiction of polyamorous relationships that wasn’t filtered through cults and sexism, where all partners mutually loved one-another and wanted the best for each other. 

Enter Trigonometry. 

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Trigonometry is another HBO product, a 2019 miniseries by Duncan Macmillian and Effie Woods. The premise is simple: Kieran and Gemma are a couple living in London. Kieran is an EMT, and Gemma owns a quaint cafe, but the two are struggling to make rent, so they take on Ray as a roommate. Ray is a former Olympian synchronized swimmer who’s working odd jobs after an accident gave her crippling PTSD. As Kieran and Gemma prepare to get married, they also find themselves hopelessly, desperately falling for their enigmatic, charming new flatmate. 

This show has the masterful writing, acting, cinematography and set design of an HBO show, the actual style and tone of the show is completely different from Big Love—or any other HBO program I’ve seen, for that matter. Trigonometry displays a nuanced view of human sexuality, gender dynamics, family dynamics, and polyamory, but at the end of the day we’re always meant to root for Kieran, Gemma and Ray. The dreary, bleak atmosphere found in Game of Thrones, Sopranos and Westworld is replaced with warmth, love and coziness. Watching these three fall for each other feels like coming home, wrapping in a blank and drinking a steaming mug of cocoa while watching the stars. 

Because the miniseries is only 8 episodes, it keeps switching up its own structure, and no two episodes feel quite the same. While this might sound a bit confusing, it’s actually to the narrative’s benefit. One of the main problems with crafting a believable, compelling romance story is that we have to understand Characters A and B before we understand the relationship A and B have together. This is why so many romance subplots fall apart in otherwise great stories: one party in the relationship isn’t fleshed out even to make the actual dynamic compelling. TV Tropes refers to this as the “Satellite Love Interest,” a character who only exists to be a love interest, and it’s why even if we understand Character A and how Character A interacts with Character B, we can root against the relationship if we don’t understand Character B on their own. If one character has multiple potential love interests (either because it’s a love triangle or a polyamorous story), this creates a new problem: all of the love interests have to be fleshed out in relation to each other, not just the main character. To use Big Love as an example again, the show fleshed out Bill, Barb, Margie and Nicki as characters, and Bill’s dynamic with each of them is developed… but the sister-wives all have very one-note dynamics with each other. Nicki bosses Margie around, Barb bosses both of them around, that sort of thing. 

Trigonometry is a show built around believable healthy polyamory, so it had the Herculean task of making Ray, Gemma and Kieran believable as individual characters; then selling us on the Gemma-Ray, Gemma-Kieran and Ray-Kieran dynamics individually; then selling us on the chemistry that they all have together. But I think the show did a great job with this because its narrative structure is shifting so much. 

• Episode 1 establishes the unique group dynamic they all have, with actors Gary Carr, Ariane Labed and Thalissa Teixeria selling their attraction on body language and eye movements alone. Starting with the group dynamic was a good idea, because it leaves the audience craving more of that group dynamic in the coming episodes, and it makes the characters feel incomplete unless all three of them are together. 

• Episode 2 then forks off in three directions, with a subplot about Kieran, a subplot about Ray and a subplot about Gemma, so the audience can see how they act apart from one-another. 

• Episodes 3-5 all elaborate on one of those subplots while pairing the other two characters together. Gemma interacts with her father, while Ray and Kieran bond over their trauma. Kieran interacts with his sister and nephew, while Gemma finds herself attracted to Ray’s empathetic nature. Episode 4 (the wedding) and Episode 5 (the honeymoon) are both about Gemma and Kieran…but without Ray, Kieran and Gemma’s relationship suddenly feels empty, hollow, meaningless. The purpose of that shifting narrative structure was to get the audience and the characters used to Ray’s presence, so that her absence felt unspeakably lonely. They plead for Ray to come back, but she refuses initially; she has to first finish her own character development and figure out what she wants out of life before she can restart the relationship, this time more on her terms. 

• Episodes 6-8 take place many months afterwards, acting as a sort of belated epilogue. After the emotional roller coaster of the previous two episodes, these episodes let us settle back into that intoxicating three-way dynamic, and we get to perceive the relationship from the perspective of the supporting cast. 

In classical literature, we would refer to Episode 5’s opening as the peripeteia, the reversal of the narrative, where they leave Ray for their honeymoon. Their hamartia—or fatal flaw—is their fear that by dating Ray, it will affect their commitment to one-another and their relationships with their respective families. Kieran and Gemma’s anagnorisis—the realization that changes everything—is that they need Ray to be happy. 

I’ve mentioned the supporting cast a few times, so I should probably get into that as well. The supporting cast for the show includes:

• Mathilde, Ray’s mother, who she has a dysfunctional and sometimes toxic relationship with. 

• Moira, Ray’s childhood friend who is struggling with her sexuality and taking it out on Ray. 

• Nick, Gemma’s disapproving brother, who’s having marital problems with his wife after the birth of their son. 

• Dee, Kieran’s sister, who is struggling as a single mother. 

• Walter, Gemma’s Caucasian military father, who—despite not understanding her polyamory, bisexuality and lifestyle at first—eventually comes around and gives his warm approval. 

• And many, many more. 

It is through this supporting cast that Trigonometry gets to explore a whole multitude of themes and ideas. In these final episodes, Trigonometry explores approval of polyamory with Caroline; disapproval of polyamory with Nick and Mathilde; sexuality and toxic friendships through Moira; class differences, racial differences and generational differences with Walter; sibling dynamics through Nick and Dee; and so, so, so much more. 

While I was mixed on the fact that the show spends so much time on this, I ultimately came around to the idea. Kieran, Gemma and Ray are all vastly different people, and by exploring how their social networks and families coalesce, we really get the sense that their three lives are intertwining. 

Conclusion:

In the end, both of these shows are absolutely brilliant for entirely different reasons. Big Love is brilliant for its depiction of a divided social backdrop. The already fringe religion of Mormonism is combated by even more fringe Fundamental Mormonism and the equally rare Ex-Mormonism, both of which are taboo for entirely different reasons. The friction between these three groups is tearing Salt Lake City apart, and our main characters all embody different elements of these groups, making the Henrickson family a microcosm for the larger social problems in Utah. Unlike the rest of their state, the Henrickson family has managed to overlook their differences and band together—at least, in the beginning. As the show progresses, the differences between the main cast become more powerful than their similarities, and it threatens to drive them apart. It’s an incredible look at fringe religions and the power they can hold in small communities (and even large communities), but it’s not exactly a nuanced, healthy look at polyamory. 

Trigonometry, on the other hand, is that nuanced look at polyamory. It embraces its setup and takes it to the fullest extent. The entire show is crafted in a way that seems typical on the surface but secretly has a brilliant narrative structure meant to seamlessly flesh out this three-person relationship. It develops each main character in their own subplot, then brings them all together, then uses the supporting cast of those three subplots to explore a multitude of ideas about gender, sexuality and families. 

In essence, Big Love is a show about how even social groups that seem similar on the surface can actually tear each other apart, and how the smallest of differences can create butterfly effects that last for decades. Trigonometry is about intersectionality; it shows how people that seem vastly different can come together to form something beautiful and pure, and how those connections ripple throughout our lives and change us forever. 

I love both of these shows, but they’re for entirely different audiences. If you want a deep, dramatic dive into one of America’s most peculiar subcultures, Big Love is for you. But if you’re craving a series that shows the diversity of the human experience and how strange and powerful love can be, Trigonometry is what you want. 

Thank you for reading, and I am signing off for now.