Critical Reception
Review aggregate Metacritic indicated positive critical response for all five seasons. The average scores for the first through fourth seasons were 72/100, 71/100, 79/100, and 70/100, indicating "generally favorable reviews". The fifth and final season received an average score of 85/100, or "universal acclaim".
Heather Havrilesky of Salon.com said of Big Love, "There are elements of this new series that have a quirkiness that might seem deliberate or overly clever against a different backdrop, but that feels natural in its own gracefully odd environment."
Time magazine's James Poniewozik named it one of the Top 10 Returning Series of 2007, ranking it at #5.
However, the Phoenix New Times's Robert L. Pela called the show a "hot-soccer-mom fantasy" and "about as down and dirty as the old sitcom Three's Company", and said its portrayal of polygamy was "just as tidy as a deodorant commercial".
In contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman called Bill Paxton a "wonderfully underappreciated actor" and the show itself "compelling, but not easy".
Read more about this topic: Big Love
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)