NEW YORK (The Wall Street Journal) — If the first season of HBO’s “Big Love” — about a three-wife family in sunny Utah — was enticing, season two (Mondays, 10-midnight Bermuda time) manages to be that and more. “Big Love” seems indeed to have grown bigger — larger in its ambitions, heftier in its observations, and in the dry humour that can ripple up in scenes of the most urgent high drama.The Henricksons, for those who haven’t met them before, are a polygamist family living their faith out in secret, in the heart of a modern Mormon society that views their kind as outcasts. Neighbours view them with suspicion — the wives inhabit three different houses, visited at odd hours by the family head, Bill Henrickson, to name just one reason. The lives they lead, in short, aren’t simple, and they’re further complicated by that family head’s determination to live within the larger society and, one day, assimilate. Bill (Bill Paxton) is an enthusiastic, visionary businessman. With his friend Don (Joel McKinnon Miller), a faithful fellow practitioner of polygamy, he has invested everything in an up-and-coming home-improvement business called Home Plus — a name ripe with opportunities for insult.

The writerly inspiration that produced it — what better handle for an enterprise run by polygamists? — pays dividends during a rich episode two, where, among other crises, Bill’s ambitious advertising plans run into trouble. The huge billboard displaying his “Home Plus” sign along a conspicuous stretch of the highway leading to town has been defaced with obliquely suggestive messages about the polygamist practices of the business’s owners.

Still, with characteristic authority, Mr. Paxton’s Bill is having none of it. Unblinking in his faith — not just in the sanctity of his domestic arrangements but in his rights as an American — he’s an indefatigable fighter, certain that there is a positive outcome ahead. He succeeds in getting the sign scrubbed clean fast, even after his demand for action is dismissed in a daunting encounter with the local king of billboard cleaners, who rants about the pressures of highway beautification programmes and their chief proponent, Lady Bird Johnson — whom he sneeringly calls “pruneface”. Bill Henrickson is having none of this, either, as he goes off to find alternatives — but not before delivering his contemptuous judgment about people who disparage a US First Lady in this way.

The positive outcome ahead, as he often tells his wives, depends on unity and purpose — a faith no doubt enhanced by his readings about Lincoln, the American leader he most reveres. One scene shows this husband of three, father of seven, driving toward some crisis or other with two essential guides for living on the seat beside him — The Book of Mormon and, next to it, “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a study of Lincoln’s strategic, managerial genius. Not a surprising interest for a character like Bill — a man, after all, with more than one union to hold together.

What holds the series together is Mr. Paxton’s performance, along with those of numerous others in the show’s exceptional cast.

There’s no taking your eyes off the key principals here. Jeanne Tripplehorn, as first-wife Barb, is torn, even as she’s exalted by the demands of her domestic role. Chloe Sevigny, playing second-wife Nikki, is as menacing here as in most of her roles. Even as a New Republic editor in “Shattered Glass”, in which she played the kindest of bamboozled nurturers, Ms Sevigny had the look of a serial poisoner. Nor do you take your eyes off Ginnifer Goodwin for long. Her Margene, the third wife, is a somewhat bamboozled sort herself, childlike in her seductiveness but no less sturdy a wifely soldier for all that. Nor off Harry Dean Stanton as Roman Grant, the viciously corrupt leader of an extreme polygamous cult — a role Mr. Stanton carries off with such guile it’s hard to remember to hate him. Wife number one, Barb, emerges this season as a woman torn between hunger for the great world outside her secret compound — one that holds the promise of universities, a chance to teach, to learn, to feel young and free again — and her bonds to this special family. And Ms Tripplehorn has made the most of it.

It is a measure of her power as an actor, and also of the writers’ skill, that the choice between that world of possibilities outside and the burdensome, tension-fraught one of the family can seem at all a difficult one. Alarmed, after one of Barb’s rebellious moments of vision — in which she appears ready to pack up and go — Bill asks, with his irresistible combination of needfulness and authority, whether she’s coming back into the house. The answer is wordless but clear. She is of course headed nowhere but into his arms. Big love indeed. Remarkably enough, the logic is all quite persuasive. More to the point, it’s the product of artful creation. The signs of such promise were evident from the outset of the series — and that opening ballet danced to the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” was one of them. In its second season that promise has been amply, deliciously fulfilled.