The Chronicles of Marna

Let’s face it: the Army isn’t the sexy service. It doesn’t have coastal settings, fighter fly-bys, and pristine white uniforms. Instead, they slog through muddy training near towns ending in “ville.” What the Army does have is an elemental connection between leader and led. As a force, they’re less concerned with technology and more with group dynamics. It’s a ripe opportunity to explore basic human emotions in a high-stakes environment.

I salute any attempt to dramatize the Army, as Lifetime TV does with Army Wives, a series which premiered June 3. That said, I don’t think it was “on target” as one reviewer noted. While it had commendable aspects, the first episode was saturated with stereotypes and cliches. Sometimes a show needs to find its stride, so I’m optimistic that Army Wives will fill out the characters and end its over-reliance on stale material.

Produced by Mark Gordon who brought us Grey’s Anatomy, and drawn from the book Under the Sabers by real-life Army wife Tanya Biank (who is a consultant), Army Wives follows characters at the fictional Fort Marshall, a division post near Charleston, SC.

Roxy (Sally Pressman) stars as the deep-south-barmaid-with-a-heart-of-gold who marries her earnest soldier after a four-day courtship. With her gee-whiz, blank slate attitude, she becomes the plot device to explain military culture to the audience–acronyms and afternoon teas, for example. Roxy has an uncanny ability to end up in the middle of things, and she’s often the mother-confessor to others. As an uniniated military wife, she always points out when the emperor wears no clothes.

Claudia Joy Holden is the enameled colonel’s wife (icily overplayed by Kim Delaney) who politics for her husband’s promotions like Lady Macbeth. She’s what we in the business call an “Army power wife,” a woman overly identified with her husband’s career who often wears his rank. Claudia’s fuming over a lost general’s star which portends more intrigue.

Catherine Bell plays Denise Sherwood, the wan but devoted wife and mother hiding the secret that her son abuses her. I saw her character in American Beauty in the medicated Marine wife who could barely make it through the day. No woman who manages Army life can be that passive. Dig deep and find your inner JAG lawyer, Ms. Bell! Her husband, Major Sherwood, is the buttoned-down officer who upbraids his teenager for being ten minutes late. Didn’t I see this military man in The Great Santini? I’m sure I did.

The least believable character is the female Lieutenant Colonel Joan Holden (Wendy Davis), recently returned from an unrealistically long two-year tour as a battalion commander in Afghanistan. In an opening sequence, she’s having stall sex with her husband in the women’s bathroom during a promotion party. Yeah, right! A few days later the deep-south-barmaid pulls a drunk and depressed Joan off the bar where she’s doing her coyote ugly imitation. These nutty scenes don’t do anything to illuminate Joan’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a serious subect that deserves more exploration than a whiskey-induced pole dance. How about a heightened fear of overpasses and loud noises, jumpiness, and insomnia? That makes more sense in this context. Joan’s husband, Roland (Sterling K. Brown), serves as the sole male Army spouse in the cast.

Finally there’s Pamela Moran (Brigid Brannagh) who decides to become a paid surrogate to help her family get out of debt. The episode ends with her improbable emergency delivery of twins on the pool table at the local juke joint, ably assisted by the deep-south-barmaid and three others. It was such a farcical finish that I had to laugh. Again, I’ve seen the “bonding over childbirth” scene in a few B movies.