In the abundance of military movies and TV shows about war and one’s experiences in that world, we rarely get to spend time with those who support these men and women from a distance, those making sacrifices of their own in order to maintain a normal life at home for their family. These people are the spouses, the ones left behind to tend to the children, pay the bills, and do all the regular household duties and try to live a normal life while their spouse is stationed overseas.
Their story is a tale worth telling, and over the course of seven seasons, Army Wives did just that, following the lives of five Army spouses — four women and one man — living on an army base, as they deal with challenges most of us never have or will experience.
In ‘Army Wives,’ Strangers Become Close Friends Through Their Shared Reality
Army Wives is based on a non-fiction book by journalist and author Tanya Biank, who is an Army wife herself. The series begins in the fictional South Carolina Army base Fort Marshall, where Roxy (Sally Pressman), who had been engaged to her husband, Private First Class Trevor LeBlanc (Drew Fuller), for less than a week, has moved in with her two children into their new home. She’s struggling with the new reality of being an Army wife, and takes a job as a bartender at a nearby bar. There she meets Claudia Joy Holden (Kim Delaney), the wife of one Col. Michael Holden (Brian McNamara), and invites her to a tea party at her home.
There she meets Roland Burton (Sterling K. Brown), a psychiatrist who is having trouble reconnecting with his wife, Lieutenant Colonel Joan Burton (Wendy Davis), back stateside after a 2-year deployment in Aghanistan, and Denise Sherwood (Catherine Bell), whose uncompromising husband, Major Frank Sherwood (Terry Serpico), is about to be deployed, leaving her to deal with their son’s explosive anger and abuse. She also meets Pamela Moran (Brigid Brannagh), who is due any day to give birth to twins, but not her own.
In order to get her family, which includes her husband Chase (Jeremy Davidson), who is part of the oft-used and highly secretive Special Operations Unit Delta Force, she’s acting as a surrogate on the down-low. “Any day” turns out to be that day, with Pamela going into labor unexpectedly, and giving birth at the bar Roxy works at. The group bands together to keep Pamela’s secret — about both the surrogacy and their family’s financial situation — and as the series progresses, the group grows ever closer, leaning on each other over things that only they would understand.
‘Army Wives’ Is Both Accurate and Exaggerated for Entertainment
If Army Wives sounds like a soap opera, it kind of is, with a group of real Army wives saying that the plots often feel more likely to play out on Desperate Housewive‘s Wisteria Lane. It’s a distinct difference from Army Wives: The Unwritten Code of Military Marriage, the book the series is loosely based on, which Biank felt prompted to write after covering the deaths of four Army wives, murdered by their husbands over a six-week span, as a military reporter for the Fayetteville Observer. The intent was never to write a true-crime book, but to tell a broader story about the lives of military wives, adding, “The purpose… was to humanize spouses. It’s so easy when you turn on the news and hear that five soldiers have been killed to just hear it as background noise.”
But that difference is by design. “The show is a drama,” Biank says, “It’s not a primer on military life. But it makes people think about what military families go through.” That sentiment is shared by Jemma Urquhart, a mother of two whose husband returned from Afghanistan in 2019, saying (per The New York Times), “If it gets a little out there about what Army wives go through, that’s good.” Another one of the positives that Urquhart points out is how Army Wives focuses on a range of wives, which echoes the four women that Biank centers her book on: the spouses of an officer (Roland/Claudia), a command sergeant major (Denise), a new Army wife (Roxy), and a special operations soldier (Pamela).
Army Wives may be dramatic, yes, but authentic, something that show creator Katherine Fugate aimed for, using two Army advisers for each script (per New York Times). For every episode that goes over-the-top, like Season 1’s “One of Our Own” that sees a soldier take hostages, there are more that skew closer to reality, both the darker – PTSD (Season 4’s “Scars and Stripes”), addictions (Season 2’s “Safe Havens”) – and the mundane, like taking out the garbage or dealing with finances.
Season 3’s “Disengagement” is an episode that is neither, but rather falls in the middle. Chase returns from overseas to the new home Pamela and the kids have moved into and criticizes everything from the furniture to how Pamela plays catch with their son, with Davidson and Brannagh deftly handling a moment that seems banal but hides the potential to be explosive. That careful balance between drama and authenticity kept Army Wives on the air for seven successful seasons, captivating viewers like Army wife Deborah Stellfox, who summed up how she and other military spouses felt about the show, saying: “You notice that we keep watching, week after week. That says something.”
- Release Date
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2007 – 2012
- Directors
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Joanna Kerns, Lloyd Ahern II, Perry Lang, Allison Liddi-Brown, John T. Kretchmer, John Terlesky, Kevin Dowling, Rob Spera, Stephen Gyllenhaal, Patrick R. Norris, Anna Foerster, Jeff Melman, Michael Lange, Peter Werner, Tawnia McKiernan
- Writers
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Bruce Zimmerman, Karen Maser, Gil Grant, Jeff Melvoin, Barbara Hall, Amanda Lasher
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Catherine Bell
Denise Sherwood
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Harry Hamlin
Claudia Joy Holden
