| 'Sister Wives' gives us a truth stranger than TV fiction | |||
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Andrea Simakis The Plain Dealer - Cleveland, Ohio | |||
Reality television has brought us a plethora of car-wreck-fascinating, morally dubious programming, from the dental-floss thongs and debauchery of "Jersey Shore" to the JonBenet Ramsey clones on "Toddlers and Tiaras." We've seen Shorty Rossi, an ex-con in a fedora who stands a smidge over 4 feet tall, rescue pit bulls with his team of little people in "Pit Boss." We've invaded the homes of the unkempt and unhinged in A&E's "Hoarders" and steeled our stomachs to peer inside hoary Hef's bedroom in "The Girls Next Door." So what's a little polygamy? Last Sunday, TLC launched "Sister Wives," a seven-part series chronicling the marital ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs of ad salesman Kody Brown and his three wives. Well, four really, if you count his fiancee, Robyn, a brunette looker as dull and featureless as the Utah highway he travels to court her. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Browns have 12 kids; well, 13 really, as Christine (wife No. 3) is pregnant with Truly, her sixth child. The first episode aired on Sept. 26 and drew 2.3 million viewers, the biggest series premiere for the network in a year. The special one-hour first episode opens with Kody and his kubs dancing in rapturous slow motion at a wedding. "We're not the polygamists you think you know," he says in a friendly voice-over. The Browns say they decided to bust out of the "plig" closet to show the world they are a happy "alternative family." ("Plig," the Browns tell us, is cheeky shorthand for "polygamist," and its applications are endless: The Browns eat "plig" food, and the kids are "pliglets.") It helps that Kody looks nothing like Warren Jeffs, disgraced leader of Utah's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the love child of Alfred E. Neuman and Skeletor. That creepy prophet was charged with a bushel basket of skin-crawling crimes, including arranging the "spiritual marriage" of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin. Instead, Kody, toothsome and Ken-doll blond with a pleasantly scruffy goatee (think Amish surfer), evokes Bill Henrickson, patriarch of the wildly attractive plig family in the HBO drama "Big Love." In a convenient intersection of art and life, both Kody and Bill act on their hunger to broadcast their bigamy. In last season's cliffhanger, Bill (played by the likable Bill Paxton), runs for State Senate (Utah, natch) and wins. During his acceptance speech, he announces that he embraces plural marriage and drags his three deeply uncomfortable baby mamas to the podium. Before the big reveal, an anguished Bill explains his momentous decision to first wife Barb, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, she of the lovely, forever furrowed brow. "Stepping into the light is the only way to redeem myself," Bill says. In "Sister Wives," Kody is less poetic. "I like marriage," he says affably to the camera -- "and I'm a repeat offender." Police in Utah think so, too. Although polygamy is rarely prosecuted, the rub-it-in-your-face kind the Browns brought to cable TV prompted the Lehi City Police Department to launch an investigation. It is believed that some 38,000 fundamentalist Mormons in Utah and across the western United States practice plural marriage, despite the fact that it is a felony in Utah, carrying a prison term of up to five years. Though Kody is legally hitched only to first wife Meri, his spouse of 20 years, he could still be found guilty of bigamy for living with his other common-law wives in a giant house built by a plig architect to resemble a rabbit warren with connecting rooms. "When we decided to do this show, we knew there would be risks," the Browns said in a statement Tuesday. "But for the sake of our family, and most importantly, our kids, we felt it was a risk worth taking." In the first three episodes, the Browns seem to be like any suburban family, their kids sweet and well-adjusted. Truth be told, sometimes they're downright snoozy. "We do have sex, it's true," says Christine. This revelation happens during one of their many talk-to-the-camera-as-a-group moments, where Kody sits, crushed, in the center of a love seat squeezed by his zaftig wives like a capybara in the gut of an anaconda. The women make a point of saying they have three separate marriages and three separate sexual relationships -- no threesomes allowed. "We don't go weird," says Meri, wife No. 1. The ladies of the house all have their assigned roles: Meri, birth mother to only one of Kody's kids, is going back to school; Janelle (wife No. 2) is a breadwinner and loathes housework. Christine is the "domestic one," feeding and washing and home-schooling the brood. "I don't have a toaster, because more people die from toasters than sharks every year," she says, smoke billowing from her oven, where she is browning bread. The real excitement begins when Kody starts to actively woo Robyn, a 30-year-old divorced mother of three. Though she passes herself off as the happy hausfrau, Christine is a barracuda in Dress Barn casual, ready to take her husband and Robyn, the interloper and prospective wife No. 4, to task for their transgressions during a momentous date night. "Kody sealed the engagement with a kiss," she fumes, full cheeks red. She and Kody didn't kiss until they were at the altar, she explains, "because I didn't feel right kissing a married man." (Like mobsters, polygamists have their codes. Kody can sleep with other women under the same roof, as long as they wear his ring.) Christine's smackdown makes the reedy Robyn cry, a welcome, catty, smelling salt of a moment. It's worth noting that there have been no allegations of rape, incest, domestic violence or child abuse, all of the usual reasons authorities decide to prosecute notorious polygamists. If anything, the family is guilty of hubris, crimes of fashion (although the gals aren't wearing Laura Ingalls Wilder prairie dresses and haystack bouffants, no one would accuse them of being fashionistas) and saddling their kids with oddly spelled names. To wit: Aspyn, Gwenelyn, Paedon, Mykelti and Ysabel. Now that's child abuse. | |||
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Cleveland.com Originally published Saturday, October 02, 2010 | |||
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