Will Scheffer, with his writing partner Mark V. Olsen, writes about households most television would treat as a problem and treats them as a rota. Big Love is the proof, and its first two seasons are as good as the method gets.
Fi1m perspective
Three houses, one back lawn, one husband on a rota. The opening minutes of Big Love (2006) settle the question everyone watching has already asked, by declining to ask it. Bill Henrickson has three wives; the series wants to know who has him on a Tuesday, who pays for the new car and what the neighbours make of the traffic. Will Scheffer created it with Mark V. Olsen, and he has said that the two of them "talk everything through but don't actually write together", taking turns on drafts instead. It shows. The writing has the settled quality of something argued out before it was typed.
Scheffer came to television from the theatre, with plays produced in New York, and his first produced screenplay, In the Gloaming (1997), was a teleplay. He and Olsen had formed a production company together in 1992, and everything of note since has come out of that partnership. Big Love ran until 2011. Then came Getting On (2013), an American version of the BBC series set on a geriatric ward, and later episodes of The Mosquito Coast (2021), an adaptation of the novel. We have not reviewed either, but the pattern is plain enough: a closed household with rules nobody outside it would accept, and the daily business of keeping to them.
The method works because Scheffer and Olsen never stop to tell us what to think. Big Love takes polygamy as given, much as The Sopranos took the Mafia as given, and finds its comedy and its unease in the same domestic detail. We spent the pilot waiting to be asked to disapprove, and when the invitation never came we found ourselves more uneasy than any sermon would have made us. That is the series doing its job. It is also, as we said at the time, better acted than the premise deserved.
Five seasons is a long time to keep a household timetable interesting, and the later seasons of Big Love sprawl: more happens and less of it matters. The first two are among the best American television of their period, and we stand by that. The commonest complaint about Scheffer and Olsen's material is that it is hard to pitch, which is a complaint about executives rather than writers, and we have found nothing sharper said against them.
Our caveat is about the method itself. It depends on the household, and on a set of rules odd enough to make the bins interesting; take those away and we are not yet sure what Scheffer writes about. Start with the first two seasons of Big Love, and do not feel obliged to see the thing through.
Biography
Will Scheffer is an American writer, playwright and producer. With longtime collaborator Mark V. Olsen he co-created the HBO series Big Love (2006–2011), on which he also served as writer and executive producer.
He trained at the State University of New York, Purchase. Scheffer founded Anima Sola Productions with Olsen in 1992. His other television credits include Getting On (2013–2015) and The Mosquito Coast (2021).
In 1997 he received the Variety magazine award as one of the rising writers to watch. He has written plays including Easter and The Green Book.
