Hockey Wives: Season 1, Episode 3

[rsadelle]

The structure of this show is a little odd. When the first episode profiled six of the women, I expected the second ep to profile the other four. Instead it continued to follow some of the women from the first ep and introduced us to two more. Surely, I thought, the third ep would profile the last two women. It did not; instead we followed five of the women we've already met. The feel of this episode was different too. In place of formulaic introductions and staged hangouts, we followed Nicole Brown to her kids' hockey and soccer practices, Noureen DeWulf to work and to an ultrasound appointment, Tiffany Parros to a househunting trip, Martine Forget to a modeling shoot, and Emilie Blum to an Iowa Wild game. In nearly every case, we also saw them connect with female friends who aren't themselves being profiled by the show. I thought the change in focus helped flesh out the portrayal of all five of the women.

Nicole

This time around, Nicole was less obviously manipulated to be unlikeable, but I liked her less. After we see her trying to wrangle two of her kids to hockey and soccer practices (I have no idea where the other two were), she meets up with Lauren King, Dwight King's wife, and Laura Colella, Jordan Nolan's fiancée, for a private self-defense class in someone's backyard. I liked that the women were doing something together, and there's nothing wrong with learning self-defense, but their rationale sounded more like privileged fear-mongering than anything else. Lauren points out that you can look online and see when the guys are away. Nicole says, "I know here in Manhattan Beach, a lot of the crimes are follow-home crimes where, like, you come out of the house to do something and then they're hiding and following you in." That could be true of Manhattan Beach, but it sounded really off to me in tone.

We also follow Nicole around on Halloween as she takes the kids trick-or-treating. I liked what she had to say about how she wants her kids to behave: "I'm really big on manners. Our biggest job in raising them is to raise well-adjusted children who are not spoiled brats, who do not have a feeling of entitlement for anything." I did not like the way she spoke to her kids when she was trying to get them to wind down and go to bed. She says to Cooper as she's counting to three while trying to get him to go upstairs and get ready for bed, "Guess what happens when I get to three? I go and I take all of your Halloween candy and give it to Jake and Mason. Do you want that to happen?" I didn't feel good about that as a child wrangling tactic.

Dustin isn't home for Halloween, but that doesn't mean Nicole is without adult company; her cousin Heather is there with her infant daughter. We get no explanation as to why Heather is there or how close they are, but we do see them sitting down to chat after the kids are in bed. Of course, due to the nature of the show, Heather doesn't get any lines and that conversation is about Dustin and being a hockey wife. In the Nicole talking to the camera/voiceover piece that accompanies this scene, Nicole says one of the most interesting things I've heard on this show yet: "I would give this all up in a minute to have him be a normal, average guy working 9 to 5. But for him, this is his passion." I wondered a lot of about this claim. It has a bit of a "the grass is always greener on the other side" feel to it. I think I was also uneasy about it because so much of Nicole's commentary is owning her own choices - early in this ep, she says, "I chose to have four kids, but sometimes it's a nightmare." - and this made it sound a lot less like her choice or their choice but only his choice. She also says about this aspect of it, "During hockey season I try to make things as easy on him as possible. The only thing he has to worry about during hockey season is, literally, hockey," which seems to me to put an undue burden on her. It reminded me of this interview where Abby Sharp says, in response to a question about what it's like when Patrick is on the road, "I don't mean to throw him under the bus or anything. It's not too much different from when he's home because usually he's napping or resting for the game. But no, we're used to being on our own, you know, so it's really not that much different." I understand that this is an arrangement these women are agreeing to, but it doesn't seem like a fair or healthy partnership, and it lends weight to Brijet Whitney's comment from the first episode: "I've heard that the divorce rate is, like, 75 per cent after players retire." If you're going to stay together after retirement, you have to have a good foundation to begin with.

Noureen

Ryan comes to LA for a game and has a day off, so he can go with Noureen to her twenty-week ultrasound. Noureen also has a gift for Ryan: a cologne she's labeled "Baby Daddy." She says in voiceover as we see him try on the cologne and help her put on a bracelet, "I had to get him a gift because I bought myself gifts from him, so I thought it would be a nice back and forth if I got him a gift from me and me a gift from him." This could be obnoxious, but it's done lightly and in good humor and I thought it helped soften Noureen's portrayal. What really softens her is when she tears up talking about wanting to work and be a good mom, and when she talks about becoming a mom with Ryan: "Somebody I love, we dated, we got married, and now I have their child. ... I'm feeling the miracle of life right now. I think it's a blessing." She and Ryan also have an exchange about the ultrasound pictures where Noureen says, "He kind of looks like a combo of us," and Ryan chuckles and answers, "I hope so." It's not particularly notable on the show, but it's funnier/more interesting if you've heard the scurrilous internet rumor that Ryan and Noureen used to pick up men to have threesomes with in Buffalo.

Tiffany

Noureen spends an evening with the Parroses. "Of course I want to make her dinner," Tiffany says. "She has no one taking care of her, and when you're pregnant and you're tired and you're working, the last thing you want to do is make a meal." She also says, "I'm not warm in other ways, so for me, feeding people is me showing them I care," which did not make me like her any more. It's hard, but if you want to be warmer, you can change. I did enjoy watching Tiffany, Noureen, and George joke around about baby names. George suggests both Hercules and Magnus, and they all laugh when they riff off of that to arrive at Magnum.

In addition to making dinner for Noureen, Tiffany's main adventure in this episode is househunting in Las Vegas. She wants out of LA: "We live in Kings country. When you're done with hockey the last thing you want to do is, like, see hockey everywhere." Vegas is close enough that they can drive back for work for their clothing companies or to visit family, but it can also be a new start - "The most exciting thing for me about Vegas is that we get to have a new social circle" - and it's cheaper enough that they can sustain their standard of living while spending less. I thought the househunting - they're looking to rent, not buy - really helped give us a more rounded view of Tiffany. The houses are all in the 3,000-4,000 square foot range, which seems excessive for two adults and two children. Tiffany even says of one of the houses they're looking at online, "I'd like to be able to find my kids." TIffany's companion on her househunting trip is not George but rather Jill, who is captioned as "Tiffany's Long-Time Friend." It was unclear if Jill lives in LA or Las Vegas, but she is obviously someone who cares about Tiffany and who Tiffany trusts. Tiffany does not like any of the houses they look at, and she sits on the stairs at the last one to talk to George. She tells him, "That's the one I'm sitting in right now, and I want to cry. ... If I moved into this house, I would cry myself to sleep every night," and hands the phone to Jill to verify how upset she is. I think she could have come off as ridiculous and entitled in this sequence, but her distress seemed so genuine that instead I thought we were finally getting to see more of her than the hard, unkind version we've seen so far. It's the first time we've seen her really letting herself be vulnerable on camera.

Martine

Martine in this episode returns to work and to working out. She meets with a trainer and tells the cameras that she really struggled with a workout that she describes as a three on a scale of one to ten. She talks a fair amount about how hard it was, but doesn't seem upset about it. Considering how dismayed she was to tell her agency about her stretch marks in the last episode, I was glad to see she wasn't that upset about all of the changes that pregnancy and recovery from a C-section made to her body.

Martine's modeling shoot is a fairly staid one, and the most interesting thing about it is her commentary. She talks about how it takes her a little time to get back into it, and that there's a risk in modeling in general and that readjustment in particular: "You never know if the client's going to love you. They can send you home. If you're not doing the job, they can just be like, 'Sorry,' it's like, 'We're done.'" She also talks about how it's the first time since he was born that she's been away from Tyler for a whole day. She says, "I feel a little bit guilty about leaving Tyler to go to work." At a break, she calls home so she can FaceTime with him. I liked seeing more of who Martine is, and I also thought it was interesting that she was the woman in this ep who was most independent of her husband. The only thing Martine says about Jonathan in this ep is something that further emphasizes that they are separate people: "Jonathan did a photo shoot for some magazine. I think he did like a couple of hours and he came home and he's like, 'Oh my God, I don't know how you can do this all day.' I'm like, 'Just stay with hockey. I will stay with modeling.'"

Emilie

When we first met Emilie, she was clearly presented as the sweet young thing we were supposed to like. I thought she also got a more rounded portrait in this episode. She and Jon wake up at four in the morning to pack up their apartment and their tiny dogs (Freddy and Teddy) because Jon's been sent down from the Minnesota Wild to the Iowa Wild and has to report to practice at ten. They drive straight to the rink in Des Moines. Emilie leaves Jon there and goes to move into their hotel room with the dogs: "Being a hockey wife, you're alone a lot."

Emilie goes to the game with two other women: Zoe and Sarah, whose partners play for the Iowa Wild. This was very different from Emilie's interactions with the other women featured on the show. These are women she's comfortable with, and who she already knows from when Jon was in Iowa last season. She also makes an interesting comment about the divide between the AHL wives and girlfriends and the NHL wives and girlfriends: "Obviously it would be so much better if Jon was playing in the NHL, but in the AHL, I feel more comfortable with the other girlfriends. In the NHL one of the other wives had made a comment about my purse, and I came home and I cried cause I felt really just uncomfortable and just a little intimidated by the other girls. ... In the AHL because there's not as much money involved, they're a little bit more laid-back, a little bit more normal." She does it without being mean, and she doesn't name names, which I think is part of what lets her say it without coming across as bitter or judgmental.

All in all, I would call this episode an improvement over the first two, and I hope now that the show has established itself, the rest of the episodes will be more like this one.