Would You Watch Sister Wives?

Polygamy is having a moment. Anyone who has seen HBO's fictional account of a polygamous family, Big Love, knows this. Beyond the tube, several novels came out this year on the same topic: Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist and David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife. While fictitious accounts of life in a polygamous home might be more enthralling than real-life accounts, at least one sobering documentary, Sons of Perdition, has also been making the rounds in an attempt to shine some light on how the practice damages young people and rips apart families.

This fall, anyone with cable TV will be able to peer even further into the lives of a polygamous family on TLC's Sister Wives. Not wholly unlike Bill Paxton's character on Big Love, real life family man Kody Brown has three wives — Meri, Janelle, and Christine — and thirteen children. Brown's family, which hails from Utah, is known as Fundamentalist Mormon, a term used to describe small sects that adhere to older practices, such as polygamy, now banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (Modern LDS members tend to object to Fundamentalist Mormons using the term "Mormon" due to that conflation of fringe polygamous groups with the mainstream church.)

The show begins with the family's decision to welcome a fourth wife, Robyn, who will bring three extra kids into the mix. Like other TLC shows of late, this one seems a bit more committed to playing up familial weirdness (a la Jon, Kate, and children) and religious fanaticism (a la breeding for God with the Duggars) than showcasing a family from which we can actually learn about alternative lifestyles. I hope I'll be wrong when the show premieres later this month, but it sure looks like a chance to fly one's freak flag rather than educate the masses about an already fairly misunderstood practice — and in this case, the margins of faith.

While I'm not given to judging what people do in their own homes, behind closed doors, I also have to wonder if polygamy doesn't give polyamory a bad name. It's one thing to be in an open relationship or have several (perhaps intertwined, pun intended) relationships at once. But one man having several wives is far different from couples (straight or queer) who equally explore fluid boundaries in their relationships. How would people react to a woman with three husbands being branded for television? What about four people trying to figure out the definition of their group relationship? Would it be an even bigger joke, an even more humorous example than the one set to be made by Brown's family? If anything, it seems like Sister Wives will glorify one lifestyle choice in the name of religion and patriarchal norms without making space for others based on other equally legitimate criteria, like love.

Photo Credit: david_shankbone