Army Wives follows the trials and tribulations of four army wives and one
army husband whose spouses are stationed at a fictional army base in South
Carolina. However, these army spouses have as much to do with the realities of
military families as Desperate Housewives has to do with life on a typical
American suburban street. This is basically primetime soap material here, with
all of the requisite melodramatic elements and situations that come with the
genre.
The series opens with bartender Roxy (Sally Pressman) accepting a spur of the
moment marriage proposal from a soldier and moving into army life as well as the
role of the spunky outsider in the well-defined social order of the army wives'
club. We are also introduced to Pamela (Brigid Brannagh), who is serving as a
surrogate to help her family cover its bills but is trying to keep the surrogacy
a secret. The army husband in the group is Roland (Sterling Brown), a
psychiatrist whose wife provides him with a case study in post traumatic stress
disorder. Denise (Catherine Bell) is married to an upstanding officer who adores
her, but whose son is struggling through a number of issues. The glue that holds
the group together is Claudia Joy (Kim Delany), respected for her strength and
yet disliked because of her refusal to toe the line in the rigid social pecking
order of the officers' wives.
Outside of men and women in uniform, reminders that the show is taking place
on a military base, and TV audio which invariably is referencing news reports
from the frontlines, there's no real attempt here to address the realities of
life for military families. In fact, the series either knows very little about
the social aspects of military life or chooses to ignore them outright. On a
base on which thousands of soldiers are stationed, the wives of colonels are not
going to go out of their way to invite an enlisted man's wife to their tea party
even if she is "new to the neighborhood", and officers do not mix with enlisted
men at formal dinner occasions. In fact, Army Wives could easily have been set
in an accounting firm or among the faculty at a university without any serious
impact on its storylines.
As a melodrama, Army Wives is about par for the course. The pacing of the
parallel storylines tends to drag along so that they can be milked for a few
episodes worth of material and all of the characters' lives are more a series of
crises than anything else. If you enjoy this sort of thing, Army Wives will fit
the bill well enough, but otherwise it's not particularly recommendable. Army
Wives would probably have been more interesting if it actually were about army
wives.
Final Rating:
