How Long to Watch “Army Wives”?

Based on Tanya Biank's memoir Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives, this weekly cable drama detailed the lives of several military spouses (not all of them female, by the way) stationed at Fort Marshall. Kim Delaney played the central character, Claudia Joy Holden, who as the wife of Col. Michael Holden (Brian McNamara) was the newest arrival at Fort Marshall, where most of the personnel had either just returned from Iraq or were on the verge of being shipped out. The outgoing, level-headed Claudia quickly bonded with the other wives on the premises, including Denise Sherwood (Catherine Bell), an "Army brat" who'd been living on similar bases since childhood and was presently entrenched in a troubled relationship with her husband, Maj. Frank Sherwood (Terry Serpico); Roxy LeBlanc (Sally Pressman), a footloose ex-cocktail waitress who'd wed her PFC hubby Trevor LeBlanc (Drew Fuller) after a whirlwind five-day courtship; and Pamela Moran (Brigid Branagh), a former Boston cop who was hiring herself out as a surrogate mother so that she and her cash-poor Delta Force husband Chase Moran (Jeremy Moran) could claim extra benefits. There was also an "Army Husband", base psychiatrist Roland Burton (Sterling K. Brown), whose wife Joan (Wendy Davis), the base's first female African-American lieutenant colonel, was suffering from post-tramautic stress disorder after a grueling tour of duty in Afghanistan. Essentially Desperate Housewives in uniform, the series dwelt extensively on sex, intramural jealousies, and class consciousness (an Army wife's social status was, not surprisingly, determined by her spouse's military rank); and though there was surprisingly little editorializing about the War on Terror, a lot of screen space was devoted to the emotional travails arising from the then-ongoing conflict. Filmed on location in South Carolina by Grey's Anatomy producer Mark Gordon, Army Wives debuted June 3, 2007, on Lifetime.