Trapped wives the unseen victims in Mormon TV show
By Giles Whittell

Polygamy is played for laughs on the small screen, but for many women the reality is bleak
WHAT’S so wrong with having as many wives as you like — or as your god ordains? The question that made outlaws of the original polygamist Mormons has been resurrected this week by Tom Hanks, two gay Hollywood screenwriters and the people who brought you The Sopranos.

In a 12-episode television “dramedy” produced by Hanks and seized on by critics as the first big salvo in America’s next civil rights battle, the answer that emerges to this question is: not much, as long as you can afford the Viagra.

Big Love, which will reach British screens this autumn, reduces contemporary polygamy to a mixture of Desperate Housewives and The Brady Bunch. The HBO series stars Bill Paxton as a harried but essentially decent latter-day patriarch, struggling to satisfy the financial, emotional and sexual needs of three wives in suburban Utah homes. The rest