Because Series.nu (now under a new name) isn’t hosting reviews of “Army Wives” anymore, it’s back to posting them on my own blog and using my beloved (+) and (-) system.
I’ll get right to it.
MINUS: The opening scene – the one I genuinely can’t remember even though I just watched the DVRed show over my lunch break – is, for lack of a more creative word, boring. Continue reading
So, Joan’s looking good this episode. Her face gash is a shallow, almost-healed scar line, and her eye – which looked blue the previous episode and offered hope there would be at least some lasting trace of her convoy attack (in the way of many war-related wounds) – is back to brown.
We see more severe war damage in a sweet woman who lost most of her arm in an RPG attack, but there’s little reason to care about her. She’s there this episode, and if she lasts another I’ll be shocked. She’s a character no one knows or cares about; thus, the seriousness of her injury has as much impact as a story in the news that fades from people’s memories by the next day. The response to something like this, the story of a stranger, is, “Tsk. Oh, my. So sad. So, so sad what those soldiers suffer.”
It’s hardly, “GASP! NOOOOO! Not JOAN! Why did it have to happen to JOAN!? Oh, how will she–what will she–*sob*sob*–And Roland! He must be devastated! I can’t believe it!”
THAT is the reaction “Army Wives” should be going for. Not all the time – no one wants “Army Wives” to be a bloodbath – but my goodness, take away someone’s arm. Let someone kill himself (Jeremy is pretty non-essential, anyway, as a character, isn’t he? but essential enough in the larger picture to make viewers feel his loss). At the very least, let Joan’s face not completely heal without a trace of what happened. Not only will this make the viewing audience feel but a smidge of the “homefront war,” but there also would be an opportunity to have a “damaged” character live a normal life. Show the nature of the human spirit. Prove we can heal even if we’re forever carrying around the signs of earlier damage.
The one-armed woman shares her sad story with Joan, talks about her plans for her life, laments the difficulty she’ll have finding a partner, and ends – for the big emotional appeal – with, “I’ll never be able to pick up my own baby.”
Sure you will – with your one arm. I’m not downplaying the tragedy of a lost arm, and I’m sure it’s hard to pick up a baby with just one, but we’ve all seen enough reality TV to know people can pick up babies with no arms. Using their feet, even. This effort to make us have sympathy is – sorry to say – just poorly executed. Sure, I saw the stump and thought of the real service members going home with their own stumps. It does effectively communicate, “Worse things happen than a scratch on the cheek.” But that’s about all it communicates.
Come on, Lifetime. We can take it. Hit us with a cold, hard dose of painful reality. Not all the time, but once in a great while. If you’re going to put on a show about war, put some “war” into it.
That said – the armless girl does have a pretty powerful message to deliver to Joan when Joan complains that she isn’t going back to her unit, but has instead been temporarily assigned to a more peaceful school-reconstruction duty. At some point, before or after telling Joan that she likes a lot of peppers on her soft sandwiches, she shares the story of a mother who feared her daughter would never get an education before she witnessed the rebuilding of a school. No one else had ever said thank you, the one-armed girl says. Not for holding checkpoints, not for trying to create peace in town. But this woman had been grateful.
“If that’s what I lost my arm for,” she says, “I’m good with that.”
As for the rest of the show, I’m going to end up sounding curmudgeonly when I say: I was bored. The Spencer Award ceremony ends predictably (was there any doubt Claudia Joy would receive it?), but does include a chuckle-ha! when Pamela raises the volume of Lenore’s mike while Lenore bad-mouths Claudia Joy to Roxy in the hallway (and, at the same time, shows her petty, social-climbing side).
[For those curious about the Spencer Award and whether there is such a thing, there is something called the Spencer Award - but it's not for being an exceptional military spouse, and there are several of them. There's one for food service, one for folk music, one for schools...
However, there are actual awards for outstanding military spousedom. Here are just two:
Flagship Military Newspaper: Heroes at Home Military Spouse Award - launched in 2005
HQ USAREC (Headquarters United States Army Recruiting Command) Spouse Award - awarded to spouses "contributing significantly to military and civilian communities command-wide."]
Other ho-hum story lines (and such things – ho-hum story lines, that is – happen to the best of shows) - Roland’s “homefront battle” with the return of Price, who is sought after by the FBI for being loosely associated with an activist group who set off a bomb in a federal building decades ago, and teens and alcohol. The daughter of Claudia Joy and General hubby – Emmalin? – brings a new girl to a party to introduce her around, but new girl – who is bored because she apparently lived an exciting party life at “Camp Darby” – pulls out a bottle of vodka and eventually passes out and has to be brought to the emergency room.
There is a pretty cool exchange of dialogue during the party scene, though:
EMMALIN: (after new girl pulls out a massive bottle of vodka) I didn’t come here to watch you get trashed.
NEW GIRL: So, watch something else.
Yeah!
The last of my complaints in this uncharacteristically mostly-negative review is this:
In one of this episode’s final scenes, Joan brings a sandwich to the one-armed girl, who is being discharged/transferred. Joan says she made sure they added lots of peppers, and gravy, too. “I can’t vouch for German gravy,” she apologizes.
Can’t vouch for German gravy? Is she CRAZY? Has she ever HAD German gravy??
“We live in our small American neighborhood in our small American town. All we worry about is ourselves and how this war will affect us and the people we love. When Jake is home, you’ll see. You’ll care less about the war.” She shrugs. “It’s callous, but it’s true. You’ll care less because the soldier blown up by an IED won’t represent Jake, and the woman crying on TV won’t represent you.” – Homefront, page 163
Read my review of Season 3 Episode 4 here. “Claudia Joy’s looming independence is as exciting as the wacky time zone difference between Fort Marshall and Iraq.”
Read earlier reviews:
Okay, I’m guessing many of you got teary when Joan’s doctor removed her bandages and she saw Roland standing at the end of the hospital bed, but don’t you think she should have at least lost one of her eyes?
I know, I know – this is entertainment, not reality. No one wants reality. But even M*A*S*H had sobering moments. Visitors to that mobile hospital would walk away without one of their legs, or would have to deal with some other tragic element of war – something that would keep a hold on viewers long after the credits rolled. When too many characters overcome war’s effects – Joan regains all vision (and will, I predict, regain perfect skin with – maybe – the trace of a scar within four episodes), Jeremy is hunky-dorey after a very short struggle with PTSD – viewers who don’t know anyone in the military (a large part of the audience) just might start thinking war’s not such a big deal, after all.
I’m just saying.
(Also, I have to say that prior to his visit to see Joan, Roland’s reaction to the idea that she may not regain all of her vision is a little dramatic. This conflict in the Middle East has been going on for close to a decade, and people are coming back limbless, missing their sanity, or dead – things could have been worse, no? Some perspective.)
While we’re on the subject of reality…”Army Wives” does such a splendid job with Roxy and Trevor. Their home scenes are so breezily natural that I almost feel like a voyeur when I watch them. Take this episode, for example, and the scene with Roxy and Trevor discussing the new baby and their lack of money (which leads to Trevor’s decision to take a second job as a pizza delivery boy, a job he finds in under a few days – the recession must not have hit the Fort Marshall area): You have a sleepy dog on the bed. Roxy hanging out next to the dog.
Trevor shirtless with his unbuckled belt hanging down.
“Army Wives” needs more shirtless men.
For realism, I mean.
Anyway. Trevor eventually puts on his pea-green-brown shirt, followed that evening by the uniform he wears to deliver a pizza to the daughter of the General’s wife. This is embarrassing to Roxy, who the following day expresses that embarrassment to Claudia Joy when she says, “Well, think about it. You’re the General’s wife, and I’m the pizza guy’s wife” (as if being someone’s wife is a job title or an accomplishment unto itself). This inspires the push to get the Hump bar restriction removed so Roxy can work and Trevor won’t have to.
This storyline inspired two funnies:
1. Claudia Joy gets in mild trouble over drinks when her General hubby is confronted by Lenore and her husband after Lenore busts Claudia Joy gathering research that would help lift the Hump bar ban. General hubby handles it expertly, makes up some BS that makes it sound like the idea was his, and says to Claudia Joy – after Lenore and her husband walk away – “What was that all about?”
Claudia Joy shrinks down, says, “Sorry?” and then explains.
General hubby says very simply, “Well, you have 18 hours to make your case.”
His professionalism during the encounter, and his gentle discipline, of sorts, of Claudia, made me think of Ian (my husband), whose military professionalism and self-control I found devastatingly sexy one day. A few months before we were to leave for Florida to get married, I visited his office on Fort Campbell, KY for lunch. We got in some tiny argument or other about absolutely nothing, and I flipped out. (I blame it on my pre-wedding nerves.)
“If we’re going to be like this, all argue-y and weird, I don’t even know why we’re getting married!” I said like some strange, psycho chick. I said it loud enough, I know, to be heard outside his open office door.
He calmly pushed back his chair, came around his desk, held my arm, and said, “Let’s go outside.” We walked out through the desks of the soldiers under his command (sigh…yes), left the building, and got into his car to discuss my psychosis in private.
Is that not coolness under pressure? *Swoon.*
Funny moment #2: General hubby and Lenore’s husband watch a power-point presentation all military would no doubt appreciate (they’re big into power-point presentations) about the many ways the Hump bar would refine its policies. This includes a free shuttle from the bar to the front gate for drunk soldiers. (Note: Okay, so they needed a reason to bring in Roxy’s Bunnies, or whatever the short-shorts shuttle drivers are called, but soldiers would not be embarrassed to be dropped off at the front gate by a shuttle. Especially not when a DUI could result in an Article 15 that may include restriction to barracks, loss of rank, and docking of one to two months pay. Again – I’m just saying.)
General hubby decides to lift the ban on his wife’s friend’s bar.
Ian is awake by this point and sitting next to me on the couch, watching General hubby issue his decree.
“What’s with the two dudes standing behind the General at parade rest?” he says. And then, in deep man-voice, “The General always has an audience when he makes a decision.”
It’s so fun to watch the show with someone who knows the ins and outs of the military’s little things…
Speaking of the little things, PTSD isn’t one of them. If they wanted to give Denise a reason to freak out about Jeremy going back to active duty after his failed suicide attempt, it wouldn’t have been too political, or even a stretch, to focus her worry on whether he’d received enough psychological care than on her fear that he’d die after being returned to his unit (and her desire to have him get a medical discharge so he’d be safe). Not enough soldiers are getting the psych care they need, and if Jeremy did have PTSD, a medical discharge might keep him from being killed in the Middle East, but it wouldn’t fix him. If handled right, “Army Wives” could have addressed a very real issue without too much drama and without being political.
What say you? (Not just about that last paragraph, but about the show. Say anything!)
Until next week…
[Read the review for episode 1 of season 4 here.]
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Jeremy should have died.
One of my issues with the show “Army Wives” is that, as the only show on TV exploring the complexity of being married to someone in the military during war-time, it often fails to take advantage of its unique opportunity to really explore that complexity. In “Army Wives,” the lighting is often soft and golden, as are the characters. The women’s hair, even, often seems back-lit by what I can only assume is the Army Wife halo of goodness. The colors – walls, trees, Frank’s dress uniform – are saturated and rich. There is a subtle, but ever-present, reminder that this is entertainment.
The best war movies and the best war cable programs (“Generation Kill,” for example) are the best because they get dirty. They have moments of real truth.
In the first episode of “Army Wives” fourth season, the writers missed an opportunity to give viewers some real truth.
Jeremy should have succeeded in killing himself.
Denise and Frank come home from a military function and hear a gun shot. This, I understand, is how last season ended. (I missed season three.) When they open the door, they find Jeremy standing in the middle of the room with a weapon in his hand. Later, when Jeremy is in the hospital hiding his meds under his mattress, his distraught mother at home finds a broken picture frame lying face down. When she turns it over, she sees a hole torn through part of Jeremy’s head – this is presumably where the bullet went instead of through his real head, where it should have gone.
I say this not because Jeremy annoys me as a character (which he does), but because even though it’s “entertainment,” (in quotes because I’ve often been told, “It’s just entertainment!”), if “Army Wives” wants to offer viewers any real insight into the emotional trauma of war and its after-effects (and it should), it would kill off some key characters.
And not just daughters we’ve barely come to know who die in freak military-post bombings set off by unbelievable American suicide bombers.
If characters die unexpectedly, viewers who can’t imagine what it’s like to have a loved one at war will feel at least a fraction of the shock and sadness (a FRACTION – a small one) those truly going through it experience. This is something that cannot benefit enough from more understanding.
Even Jeremy’s own father, Frank, doesn’t get it. He says to his wife (Denise) after the sloppy shooting, “”I just don’t know what’s going on with him, you know?”
Don’t you, Frank? A career military man who’s deployed several times, with years of experience with other soliders, and you don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on with the son who’s just returned from a tour overseas? I know it’s overused, these days, and probably not even trendy anymore, but really?
That, above, is a Truth Moment -1. Booh, Lifetime.
As has been “Army Wives” way, however, they balanced that negative with an amusing positive, a funny Truth Moment +1, after Roland receives a call from wife Joan, who’s been wounded in a convoy attack in Iraq and is calling from her hospital bed. She wears a patch over her right eye, and her right cheek is badly scarred, lined with black stitches.
Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but think of my friend whose husband’s convoy was attacked in Afghanistan. He was hit by shrapnel, but was otherwise unhurt. One of the pieces got him in the face. (Note: in no way does what follows make light of what is a deadly, serious, and horrific situation that continues to happen, and continues to kill soldiers.) When my friend found out her husband was going to be fine, she told me she couldn’t wait to see the scar on his face. She thought it was incredibly sexy.
I wondered if Roland (or, a man) would find Joan’s (or, a woman’s) facial scar sexy. And then this happened:
Roland is told that Joan received injuries to her right side and face.
Roland: “Her face?”…pause…”She didn’t say anything about her face. I thought it was just her right side and shoulder.”
Not her FACE! Anything but that! Oh, please don’t let her turn…turn…ugly!
Okay, he’s redeemed later when we learn she’s fighting to keep her vision. Still. First reactions reveal a lot, don’t you think?
I was pleased to see there were quite a few moments of truth in this episode (excluding, of course, the caricature FRG Army Wife Queen Lenore who’s fighting Claudia Joy for the Spencer Award – or, the Army Spouse of the Year award – as if it were a Miss America crown, and the warm-fuzzy Army Wife group-hug around Roland’s baby at the end). For instance:
+1: Chase is more interested in doing Army things than he is in his family. I’ve seen this a few times. Volunteer deployments even with families at home. It’s hard to blame him for wanting to go, and it’s hard to blame her for wanting him to stay. To some, the domestic life lacks adventure and purpose. It’s just the way it is, and “Army Wives” handled it well.
+1: Roxy and Pamela walk along the beach discussing Chase’s preference for the Army over his family.
Roxy, trying to soothe Pamela and blame the Army for Chase’s behavior, says, “We both know that Army life is this big cycle–”
“No,” Pamela says. “It is not the Army. It’s him.”
Yes! Far too often the military, or deployments, are blamed for bad marriages. Granted, separation can do harm to young or already damaged marriages, but the people are the key. All of it – cheating, emotional distance, loss of interest, divorce – can’t be blamed on the military. It’s a convenient excuse, but one that prevents couples from looking at their own issues.
+1: Claudia Joy’s house is sparkling, decorated for an event. In walks Roxy, who asks if someone is getting married.
Claudia Joy: “We’re having a Command dinner.”
Roxy: “Whatever that means.”
Excellent. Roxy, whose husband is lower ranking, would not be invited to one of these social functions. Some might say she should be happy about this.
Final Moment of Truth:
Jeremy reveals to Roland why he’s going through such a psychological struggle. It’s not just survivor guilt after the death of his best friend, who took Jeremy’s place on a mission and was subsequently killed.
Jeremy tells Roland he feels like a horrible person. A sick person. Why? Because, he says, “I’m glad that it was him and not me.”
Sure, it may seem obvious. Most of us would think this, and understand it. But we wouldn’t want to say it out loud, because out in the air, it sounds selfish. But that’s the way it is.
And these ugly, hard-to-admit truths affect military spouses, too.
More so when they’re going through a deployment, which many of these Army Wives don’t seem to do for longer than about a (laughable) month at a time…
Moment of Truth -1: Not enough long-lasting deployments.
If you’re in the military or a military spouse, what did you think?
And, if you’re not either of those, what did you think? Why do you watch this show?
As Lifetime Network’s “Army Wives” is picked up for a third season, hailed for its accurate depictions of the lives of women living on an Army post, it might be unpopular to label the show as one lacking in accuracy and frantically clutching at dramatic straws.
But if the critique fits…
A recent episode of Army Wives contained such a gross inaccuracy for the sake of dramatic action that, had it been true, most Americans would no doubt skip work to protest the heartless military.
In the episode, which aired July 14, the character of a female sergeant is about to deploy, but her husband has eight months left in Iraq, and she has a daughter at home.
“Surely you have a backup in your family care plan,” says General’s wife Claudia Joy.
But she doesn’t have a backup. And when Claudia Joy tells her husband she fears the sergeant will refuse to deploy, the General — who really should know better — says that if she does, “She’ll get arrested.” Again: if the sergeant doesn’t abandon her daughter, the Army will arrest her.
In fact, the Army doesn’t want its soldiers to orphan their children. It even ensures a family care plan is in place prior to a deployment. In real life, under Chapter 5-8 of Army Regulation 635-200, a soldier in that position would have been given “Involuntary separation due to parenthood,” which is a general or honorable discharge. Or, as happens at the end of the episode, she might have her deployment deferred while she tries to find someone to care for her daughter.
But, never mind — the key is drama, and the storyline ends with Claudia Joy as a hero. Though as a general’s wife she’s not in the Army, she is repeatedly given incredible military influence in the show and, in this episode, is the one to make the sergeant’s deferred deployment possible.
This is but one example of “Army Wives” writers struggling to create conflict when there is already so much real-life strife inherent in today’s military climate. It would behoove the writers to trust their ability to use existing dramas without relying on wild contrivances.
Having been married to an Army officer who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, news last year of Lifetime’s new drama documenting the lives of wartime military spouses enthralled me. “Finally,” I thought. “Their story will be told.” I say “their” because by that time my husband was no longer in a position to deploy.
I was thrilled for this reason: In under five seconds, I can name more than six movies that offer insight into the soldier’s story (Platoon, Casualties of War, We Were Soldiers, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Thin Red Line, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Blackhawk Down). The closest Hollywood has come to exploring the psychology and emotion of having a lover at war was the 1984 movie Swing Shift, starring Goldie Hawn. More recently, a few brief scenes were given to women left behind in We Were Soldiers. Otherwise, even HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and “Generation Kill” has, until Lifetime’s “Army Wives,” neglected the surreal and complicated experience of waiting for a loved one to make it through a war.
It was this inattention that led me to write Homefront, a novel that forces readers to experience the raw and intimate drama of a deployment through the unapologetic eyes of a young woman whose soulmate is sent to Iraq in 2003.
It was after the book published that “Army Wives” first aired, and I was excited that yet another medium was being used to propel the experience into the public arena. This year, each time I watch an episode I wince, hoping the writers have taken their time this time … that they’ve focused on the sublime torture of waiting and wondering that plagues every person caring for a deployed soldier … that the writers found a way to portray the intense pain of imagining a lover’s death, or the ease with which misunderstandings wreak havoc … that they didn’t twist another relevant storyline into something unseemly. And almost every time, the episode unfolds tainted by the common ploys Lifetime is guilty of using to excite its audience: affairs and male domination.
For example, in the July 14 episode mentioned above, Denise’s deployed husband Frank doesn’t like Denise’s sudden, uncharacteristic habit of “trolling around” on a motorcycle. He fears she’s becoming too independent.
In other words, he’s stuck in sandbox-limbo and is afraid his wife’s life is gliding along without him, if not ahead of him.
To create an understanding of what these people go through, the writers could have easily left it at that: Frank’s increasing frustration with what he imagines might be happening, and Denise’s hurt and frustration at having done nothing wrong and not knowing how to convince her husband otherwise. When any conversation could be the last, it is this need to be understood that causes incredible emotional friction.
Instead, the writers throw in an extramarital attraction. Next week, one of the wives will tell Denise, “I know what it’s like to have a husband away.”
Denise makes the third of five main characters to have an extramarital interest (last season it was Pam and Roland). As if an affair is the crisis apex of a deployment, as if the audience is too base to appreciate a more complex conflict.
Don’t misunderstand. I think “Army Wives,” for all of its faults, is an important and often entertaining show. I even have a favorite “wife” (Roxy). And at long last, television is recognizing a significant portion of the population involved in these Afghanistan and Iraq wars who were previously largely forgotten, except as yellow-ribbon stereotypes.
Perhaps I’m just angry after having expected so much.
Lifetime has a unique opportunity to do something substantial. The soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are real people who really are coming home dismembered, or really not coming home at all. The loves they leave behind often go from one day to the next experiencing incredible fear the person they love will die any minute. The pain of the loss is felt before it even happens, and is quickly replaced by passionate elation at the arrival of an email or an unexpected phone call. It’s disorienting and intense. And most of the negative emotions are compounded by guilt for feeling anything negative at all while living the “cushy” life at home.
If Lifetime wants to air a show about life on a military post during peacetime, then let it be trite and contrived. But not while something real wants to be written. Lifetime is throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give screen time to a story that’s been inadequately explored. So far, anyway. Because many Army Wives episodes seem to have been written the week prior to airing, changes could probably be made fairly seamlessly. Now that it’s been picked up for a whole new season, there’s still plenty of time for redemption. And if Lifetime can’t handle it, I’m sure HBO can.
(First published in the Journal Inquirer, July 2008)
________
Today: Lifetime’s desperation didn’t kill “Army Wives,” after all – in fact, it seems to be liked more and more every season. While I can see the great appeal of the show, I still wish HBO would take on the subject in a grittier, more subtle, and more powerful way.
