The practice of plural marriage has been featured in just a handful of Z-grade films, from the outrageous 1922 British propaganda short "Trapped by the Mormons," in which a maniacal polygamist lures unsuspecting girls into forced marriages, to the 2000 comedy "My 5 Wives," starring Rodney Dangerfield as a man who inherits multiple wives.

But despite its dramatic possibilities, polygamy always has been perceived as too unsavory for a weekly TV series.

Somehow, that all changed two years ago on a Pennsylvania highway. During a drive to New York City, television producers Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer began talking about the storytelling potential of polygamy, eventually deciding to turn it into a new series called "Big Love."

"Mark said, 'I have an idea for a show - polygamy.' And I was like, 'Yuck, no one is going to want to watch that,' and we didn't talk for the rest of the way home to New York," Scheffer told The Salt Lake Tribune recently during a Television Critics Association press tour. "And then six months after being plied with wonderful books and research, I finally got it."

What they begat - with the help of actor/producer Tom Hanks and his Playtone production company - is a new series for HBO about a Utah polygamist and his three wives in the suburban tracts of Sandy.

The hourlong series premieres tonight at 11, after the critically acclaimed mob drama "The Sopranos."

"Big Love" stars Bill Paxton ("Titanic") as Bill Henrickson, owner of a home-improvement store and husband of Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the matriarch of the family of sister-wives.

"When I first heard what it was about, I thought, 'What could this possibly be?' And then I read it, and it was so human," said Paxton, who also starred in "Aliens" and "Weird Science." "I believe in tolerance, and that is what I saw in this. I suppose it's like a weird persecution that these people are kind of facing, and they are just living their choice."

While most of the shooting is done on sets in California, the crew spent more than a week in Salt Lake County last year shooting exterior scenes for the first season's 13 episodes.

To research the series, Olsen and Scheffer spent two years reading "every book about polygamy" and talking to members of the Rulon Allred polygamous sect and pored over legal documents in Utah and archived stories from The Salt Lake Tribune, according to Olsen.

"That's so important to us, veracity, authenticity," he said. "There is dramatic license, but dramatic license does not mean invented, distorted or over the top," he said. "It has to be tethered in reality."

Apprehension over how Hollywood tends to glamorize facts has polygamists and anti-polygamists eager to see how the subject is treated. Rumors of the show's sexual content - this is, after all, HBO - and a disclaimer at the end of each episode stating the LDS Church's position against polygamy has prompted both sides to criticize the series.

Tapestry Against Polygamy, a Salt Lake City-based group representing victims of abuse within polygamous relationships, worries the show will shy away from abuse as polygamist becomes protagonist.

"We're afraid it may lead people into thinking there are greener pastures on the other side of monogamy - and it does, from what we've seen," said Vicky Prunty of Tapestry Against Polygamy. "It doesn't deal with abuse issues and the issues we deal with on a day-to-day basis. It is a false advertisement for anybody interested in polygamy."

The creators insist the series will delve deeper into some of darker aspects of plural marriage.

"We're going to show a wide variety of polygamist behavior and certainly some is not going to be shown in a good light," Scheffer said.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has expressed concerns about the show blurring the distinction between mainstream Mormons who have disavowed polygamy and the fundamentalists portrayed in the series. But Olsen said the church needn't worry (though the producers had no conversations with church officials during the making of the show).

"If at the end of the day there is at least a recognition that we have attempted to be fair and transparent in our handling of this material," he said, "that is all we ask out of the mainstream church."

Olsen and Scheffer are more interested in the series' broader canvas of family bonds, relationships under duress and the love that keeps it all intact.

"It's not exclusively about polygamy but about larger themes," Scheffer said. "We're more interested in exploring the family than the milieu, really. So in that sense it's like 'The Sopranos' in that it's about family."