Lifetime's Army Wives, or I Married the Media-Military-Industrial Complex

Lifetime's Army Wives is its most successful serial drama to date, depicting Army families with loved ones deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. I argue that Army Wives uses marriage to produce gendered propaganda and advance banal militarism. The program achieves verisimilitude and profitability through Lifetime's alliances with the military-industrial complex and thus frames militarism to appeal to viewers historically the most resistant to the military: women.