"Look, Donna, I swore to myself - yeah - the day I got picked for Bolton and the day that we got engaged, that was day one of my life, and all that we went through before, it's gone. It's cut off. I'm like that, Don. You know, I've gotta be. All that I care about is winning." - Ian Walmsley (Nathan Constance) to his wife Donna shortly before getting caught by the tabloids in a drug-fueled threesome
Footballers' Wives: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By A.J. Carson
Bruises, scratches, low morale and heartbreaking losses. Yes, the women of the British phenomenon Footballers' Wives take their fair share of hard knocks. Being the wife of an Earls Park football player can be tough, with off-the-field games much more difficult than those fans buy tickets to see. Until now, US audiences have only been able to catch this soap on the somewhat obscure cable channel Trio, but thanks to the DVD release of The Complete First Season, a much wider American audience can now check out the show that has all of Britain abuzz.
The series takes a peek into the personal lives of the Sparks, a popular football team. Tanya Turner (Zoe Lucker) is married to the team's bad boy captain, Jason (Cristian Solimeno). She likes her husband, but she loves his money.and the cocaine it enables her to buy. Jason might be a hotheaded lout who shags every woman he runs across and is constantly in danger of being tossed from the Sparks' roster, but he does pay the bills, and Tanya will do anything to keep him on the team. Anything.
Chardonnay Lane (Susie Amy) is a gorgeous model (with an oh-so-classy name) who has made numerous topless Page 3 appearances in the tabloids. She's engaged to Kyle Pascoe (Gary Lucy), an equally gorgeous Earls Park player. Together, they are as popular with the media as Posh and Becks, but their relationship is nearly derailed by a tragic bachelorette party accident that threatens Chardonnay's career and her sense of self. The couple decides to go through with their fairytale wedding anyway (literally a fairytale wedding: Chardonnay plays Sleeping Beauty to Kyle's Prince Charming) but then have to deal with the fallout from Char's mishap. (It would be giving away too much to even hint at the nature of the accident - just know that it's wickedly imaginative.)
Donna (Katharine Monaghan) and Ian Walmsley (Nathan Constance) were childhood sweethearts, but now Don is having a problem adjusting to her husband's newfound fame and fortune. She even buys off-the-rack dresses and snips out the labels to fool Ian into thinking that she's wearing designer duds. She's also haunted by the memory of the child that she and Ian were forced to give up when they were thirteen. Now that they're well-off, Donna wants to track down her son. Even though he dotes on their young daughter, Ian is perfectly willing to forget about their son, especially since the situation might produce a scandal that would disrupt his career.
The Earls Park team is about to get bigger. Management has hired Salvatore Biagi (Daniel Schutzmann), a hot Italian player, to help shore up the team. He plays the same position as Jason, a fact not lost on the quick-tempered team captain and his coked-up wife. They confront the team's chairman, Frank Laslett (John Forgeham), but with less than desired results: thanks to Tanya, Frank ends up in a coma. The police and the team's other officials believe that Frank was in a car accident, and the couple hopes that Frank won't wake up to set the record straight.
So, what exactly do you need to know about football to understand Footballers' Wives? First off, "football" refers to the sport that we call soccer. Second.well.that's it. Just as you don't have to be involved with the evening news to enjoy The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Footballers' Wives merely uses the sport as a backdrop for its tawdry tales. We never even see an actual game, just hear snippets of one on a radio broadcast. Indeed, when the characters talk about balls, they're usually not talking about the kinds that get kicked around on a field.
Footballers' Wives is something that we don't see all that often on nighttime TV these days - a pure, old-fashioned soap opera. Most other neo-soaps are leavened with a liberal dose of humor. Desperate Housewives places almost as much emphasis on slapstick humor as it does dramatic plot twists. At Home with the Braithwaites - another excellent British soap - has a breakneck pace and anything goes attitude that verges on parody. Footballers' Wives, however, is soapier than a commercial for laundry detergent. It borrows standard plot devices from daytime soaps - kidnapping, attempted murder, comas, serial cheating, heartbreak and woe - and presents them in a straight forward way that avoids the campiness of earlier nighttime soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty.
Which is not to say that the series is staid and boring. The series is filled with ribald language - much of it in British slang that will be mostly lost on American audiences. (Luckily, the DVD producers have included a handy glossary of slang terms as one of this set's extras.) The series is also sprinkled with bits of nudity - male and female.
Many of the series' twists and turns are quite juicy. Frank's intensive care nurse, Janette Dunkley (Julie Le Grand), takes her nursing duties a bit too seriously, leading to an outrageously shocking (and funny) case of inappropriate bedside manner. Donna's sixteen-year-old sister, Marie (Micaiah Dring), exhibits enough bad behavior for ten soap operas. As the season draws to an end, cliffhangers involving a kidnapping and a surprise pregnancy (or is that 1 ½ surprise pregnancies?) are sure to leave views on the edge of their seats.
Footballers' Wives' biggest flaw is that it has very few likeable characters with whom the audience can relate. Donna is a bit too wishy-washy. Chardonnay's accident should win us over to her side, but then she becomes too whiny and self-involved. Tanya has the potential to evolve into a compelling Lady MacBeth meets J.R. Ewing immoral-person-we-love-to-hate, but falls short of the mark here. In the meantime, Marie fills that position by default. She doesn't do anything evil, but we like her most for her bad qualities.
The eight episodes that make up Footballers' Wives: The Complete First Season are divided onto two discs. The discs are housed in a digipak. Publicity and production stills can be seen through the clear plastic trays that hold the discs. The back of the digipak features a character guide, including photos, character names, brief character descriptions, and the names of the actors playing the roles. The digipak slides into a cardboard outer sleeve.
The elegant menus allow viewers to play all episodes on a disc or choose an individual one. Choosing an individual episode leads to a series of screens containing a detailed episode synopsis. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are no scene selection menus.
