The War at Home

By James Poniewozik

Lifetime may be your one-stop network when it comes to women-in-peril movies and Golden Girls reruns, but it's not the first media outlet that comes to mind when you think of geopolitics. So it's a bit surprising that the first hit drama to regularly deal with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is not 24 (which pits Jack Bauer against our mortal enemies in ... China) or The Unit (which has its special forces spending most of their time in such not-as-hot spots as ex-Soviet Georgia) but Army Wives.

Granted, Lifetime's highest-rated series ever, which takes place on a Stateside base, never sets a dusty foot in the combat zone. It's a guilty pleasure first, soapy and cliched; there's rarely an emotional moment without a big-eyed kid or a Jude Johnstone ballad to cue the waterworks. There are affairs, alcoholism and girl-talk sessions in which the characters chat about nicknaming their "lady parts" ("my fine china," for instance).

But the show is also stark and up front about the cost of years of war--starker, in a way, because the focus is on the families left behind. Pamela (Brigid Brannagh)--whose husband is about to ship off for duty--becomes a surrogate mother to keep the family afloat (a reminder of how stretched military families often are). Roland (Sterling K. Brown) deals with his returned-vet wife's drinking and post-traumatic stress disorder. Denise (Catherine Bell) waits anxiously after her husband's Blackhawk crashes in Iraq. Only one spouse goes to war, the show says, but the whole family goes under siege.

The big important show of the Iraq era was supposed to be Steven Bochco's 2005 war drama Over There on FX, but it quickly faded. The analysis was that it was too risky to dramatize a war in which people were still dying. Yet when Army Wives ran up the flagpole, nearly 4 million viewers a week saluted. Why? It's studiously apolitical--"Their battle goes beyond politics, beyond religion, race or gender," a wife says about soldiers now at war--but so was Over There. It's soapy, but Over There was too, with affairs and home-base family dramas along with the IED blasts.

Army Wives, created by Katherine Fugate, may be more effective precisely because it's a domestic drama on the network "for women"--the same reason, perhaps, that it hasn't been taken seriously enough to be controversial. There is something a little obvious--a little male, maybe--about assuming that telling truths about war has to mean showing battle. Combat is so foreign to many viewers, however, that it can actually distance the audience.

But strained marriages, difficulty with kids and constant worry--that people can understand. On this show, war is more than fighting. It's separation and alienation. It's buying kids' shirts in bargain packs to save money. It's every exhausting problem of marriage, compounded by the fear of sudden death and of losing your home and support system along with your spouse.

Army Wives probably goes down easier because it stays out of the war zone, but its potency comes from what we know it's not showing us. When a private's stepson asks if he's going to Iraq "to kill the bad guys," he answers, "No, to help the good guys." Corny? Sure. But what goes unstated--that we know the distinctions between good and bad guys are often fatally unreadable--makes the scene stronger. We're conditioned to believe that dying in battle equals Serious Drama; Army Wives argues that saying goodbye to a child is just as much so.

In the end, the important difference between Over There and Army Wives may simply be two years and about 2,000 soldiers' lives. Civilians may never really know what it's like over there; a TV drama may never really be able to teach them. But going into the fifth year of Iraq, they're ready to respond to what Army Wives says: that war is something that also goes on Over Here.