Like Hulu’s The Dropout, the show can use its creative license to shrink a sensational story back down to an intimate scale. What happened in between explains not just Brenda’s murder, but the thin line between believer and zealot faith and madness and, most provocatively, church and cult.Īs a work of fiction, Under the Banner of Heaven has tools at its disposal that Krakauer did not. Her love story with Allen (Billy Howle), the youngest, ends with him soaked in her blood. When Brenda first meets the Laffertys they’re the picture of Mormon propriety: pious, industrious, clean-cut, and close-knit. Jeb is a fictional character, carefully constructed by Black to personify the faithful aghast at the crimes committed in their name.Ī former pageant girl from Idaho, Brenda had married into the Lafferty clan, a brood of five boys that Jeb’s partner Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham), a non-Mormon of Paiute descent, calls “the Kennedys of Utah.” He’s being only partly sarcastic. The murders, perpetrated in heavily LDS Utah County in 1984 on the anniversary of the state’s Mormon settlement, are tragically real. If the premise of Big Love was that even religious extremists could lead surprisingly normal lives, Under the Banner of Heaven inverts it: Even the most by-the-book congregant, the show argues, can have ties to wildly unorthodox beliefs-whether they’re conscious of those ties or not.įor its journey to the screen, Under the Banner of Heaven gives that congregant a face and a name: Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), the devout Latter-day Saint assigned to investigate the shocking, bloody murder of young housewife Brenda Wright Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her 15-month-old daughter. They’re also the subtext of the seven-episode adaptation that premiered this Thursday on FX, written by Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black and initially directed by Hell or High Water’s David Mackenzie. These conflicting stereotypes are the subject of journalist Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a book that starts as a work of true crime and expands into a popular history of the entire church. And yet the mainstream church of more than 16 million members is directly adjacent to lurid and violent acts of social rebellion, both in its canonical history and its current fringe. The modern image of the church is almost aggressively straitlaced: the teetotaling that extends even to caffeine the missionaries’ mandatory collared shirts and ties the many, many mommy bloggers. But, like most outside accounts of the LDS faith, Big Love was also interested in a much broader contradiction. Big Love clearly followed in the footsteps of The Sopranos, mining a similar contrast: an exotic, illegal subculture dealing with domestic mundanities.
From 2006 to 2011, HBO aired Big Love, an ensemble drama about a practicing polygamist and his three wives living quasi-undercover in suburban Salt Lake. That fascination extends to prestige television, where creators have ample time and space to explore it. Even more recently, a student group known as the Black Menaces went viral on TikTok for asking their peers at Brigham Young University how they feel about feminism, gay marriage, civil rights, and more. There aren’t many practicing Mormons in the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but the church nonetheless looms over every aspect of the show, from the Muslim convert who takes issue with its history of racist ideology to the woman excommunicated for having an affair. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who grew up one state over from Utah in Colorado, took musical theater by storm with The Book of Mormon, a characteristically lewd comedy about LDS missionaries in Uganda. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an enduring object of fascination in popular culture.