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Polygamy and Large-Family Reality Television

Plural marriage and the very large religious family became television genres in the 2000s, and in one case a television programme caused the litigation that reshaped the law. This page covers both the polygamy shows and the adjacent large-family shows, and keeps them distinct — because they are routinely confused, and the families themselves are not of the same religion or practice.

Sister Wives (TLC, 2010– )

Sister Wives follows Kody Brown and his wives — Meri, Janelle, Christine and later Robyn — members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a fundamentalist group separate from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has prohibited plural marriage since 1890.

Its legal significance is unique in reality television: broadcasting the household triggered a criminal investigation. Lehi, Utah police opened a bigamy inquiry after the first season aired, and the family left for Nevada. They then sued, producing the district-court ruling in Brown v. Buhman (2013) that struck down the cohabitation prong of Utah's bigamy statute — a ruling the Tenth Circuit vacated on mootness grounds in 2016, partly because the Browns had moved and no longer faced a credible threat of prosecution. The show created the standing, and then destroyed it.

The series also documents the contract-not-licence structure in practice: only one marriage is legal at a time, and across the show's run Kody's legal spouse changed — he divorced Meri and legally married Robyn in 2014, for stated reasons including adoption of Robyn's children. That is the asymmetry described in Plural Marriage as a Business — Contracts Instead of Licenses playing out on camera: the legal wife holds rights the others cannot obtain, and which spouse holds them is a decision the household makes. Christine separated in 2021, Janelle and Meri subsequently, and the dissolution of the plural household became the later seasons' subject.

Big Love (HBO, 2006–2011)

Fiction, and worth separating from the documentary shows. Bill Henrickson, a Salt Lake City home-improvement businessman, lives in three adjoining suburban houses with three wives. Its themes are precisely the ones this cluster of pages is about: the family business as the real structure of the household, the concealment required, the tension with both the mainstream Church and a fundamentalist compound modelled on the FLDS. It predates Sister Wives by four years and set the frame most viewers brought to the later documentary series.

The FLDS documentaries

A separate and much darker body of material concerns the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints under Warren Jeffs, convicted in Texas in 2011 of child sexual assault.

• Escaping Polygamy (A&E/Lifetime, 2014–2019) — follows women who left the Kingston clan and other groups, assisting others to leave.
• Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (Netflix, 2022) — on the FLDS and Jeffs.
• Daughters of the Cult (Hulu, 2024) — on the LeBaron group and Ervil LeBaron's killings.
• Polygamy, USA (National Geographic, 2013) — on Centennial Park, Arizona, a group that split from the FLDS and presents itself as consensual and adult.
• Three Wives, One Husband (Channel 4, UK, 2017) — on Rockland Ranch, Utah.

These are the counterweight to the lifestyle programming. The Canadian court in Reference re: Section 293 (2011) relied on evidence of this kind — child brides, expulsion of young men, coerced reassignment of wives — in upholding Canada's criminal prohibition.

Seeking Sister Wife and the courtship format

Seeking Sister Wife (TLC, 2018– ) follows households recruiting an additional wife. It is the most commercially explicit of the genre: the subject is the negotiation — who decides, what the existing wives' veto is worth, what the new partner is promised and whether it materialises. Several featured couples separated during or after filming.

Large religious families — a different thing entirely

These shows are constantly conflated with the polygamy programmes. They are monogamous.

• 19 Kids and Counting (TLC, 2008–2015) — the Duggar family of Arkansas: Baptist and associated with the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), not Latter-day Saint and not polygamous. One marriage, nineteen children. The series was cancelled in 2015 after disclosures about Josh Duggar, who was later convicted in 2021 on child sexual abuse material charges. The IBLP milieu itself became the subject of Shiny Happy People (Amazon, 2023).
• Bringing Up Bates (UP, 2015–2021) — nineteen children, same religious milieu.
• The Willis Family, Table for 12, Jon & Kate Plus 8, OutDaughtered — large-family programming with no plural-marriage element; the last two are about multiple births.
• My Five Wives (TLC, 2013–2015) — is a polygamy show: Brady Williams and his five wives, who had left the AUB and describe themselves as having moved away from its doctrine.

The distinction matters for more than accuracy. The legal exposure is completely different. A Duggar-style family has one licensed marriage and faces no marriage-law question at all. A Brown-style family has one licensed marriage and several unions whose very description can be evidence of a crime.

What the genre does and does not show

The shows are the main source of public knowledge about plural marriage, and they are selected material. Three biases are worth naming:

• Consent-forward selection. Networks commission adult, articulate, telegenic households. Coerced and underage arrangements — the subject of the prosecutions and the Canadian reference — do not generate lifestyle series.
• The economics are the plot but rarely the stated subject. Housing, income, who owns what, who is on which title: these drive most episodes of Sister Wives and are seldom named as the legal structure they are.
• Visibility cuts both ways. Broadcasting is a defence of sorts — it is hard to characterise as secretive abuse what airs weekly — and it is simultaneously the evidence. The Browns' own case is the demonstration: the show made them safe enough to sue and public enough to be investigated, then mobile enough to lose on mootness.

See also

• Mormon Polygamy and the Anti-Bigamy Cases
• Plural Marriage as a Business — Contracts Instead of Licenses
• Polygamy in International and Personal Law

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