Lifetime TV’s ARMY WIVES: Too Little of What’s Important

Lifetime TV’s ARMY WIVES is a very popular cable show about four army wives and an army husband on a imaginary post. I’ve blogged about the first several episodes of this season 2 of the series.

A few episodes back I stopped blogging about each episode because that particular episode had as a subplot a subject that I don’t touch: The army policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In truth, I can understand various positions on this subject of gays openly serving in the military, and I have no opinion as to what would be the best policy.

Another recent episode had a subplot of Roxy having an undiagnosed learning disability, which I actually wrote about in my Flipping Burgers and Beyond blog – see http://tinyurl.com/5vaj9s. Roxy’s acceptance of this learning disability and the coping skills needed to pass her GED test were featured in the most recent episode.

Also in this episode several serious topics were again lightly brushed over, including the destructive gambling habit of Claudia Joy’s father. Yet the subject whose gloss over bothers me the most is that no one in the tv series seems to get counseling for his or her problems even though the army husband – Roland – is a therapist and announces that fact frequently.

One striking example of this absence of getting counseling was a minor subplot in the most recent episode. A widow of an army man killed in Iraq inexplicably gives large sums of her death benefits money to her 18-year-old son, who of course gets in trouble due to these funds.

Finally the widow reveals that she feels responsible for her husband’s death because she urged him to re-up this last time in order to get his pension.

The subject of responsibility for another person’s actions is a very emotional one. And in a military setting this can be all the more so because officers, platoon leaders and squad leaders have to give commands that may cause the men and women following those commands to die.

Survivor guilt is a topic worthy of a much deeper treatment – yes, even on a cable television show – than is presently being done on Lifetime’s ARMY WIVES.

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Lifetime TV, ARMY WIVES, Mrs. Lieutenant, Iraq War