Ruth Sadelle Alderson

This episode was a little more freeform than the last one. We saw a few women together, but for the most part, this episode was focused on women and their partners as Christmas approaches. My favorite reviewers from The National Post were entertaining again this week, although I didn't directly connect any of their points to the rest of this entry. I'm will warn you up front that most of this entry is about Brandon Prust and Maripier Morin, and I didn't think much of either of them or their relationship skills.

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In a comment on last week's post, secretsolitaire said, "I found this episode a little more boring than some of the others -- not sure why exactly." I enjoyed last week's episode, but this week's is where I started to lose interest, to the point that I kept bringing up the controls on my video player to see if I was close to the end yet. I'm not sure what made this episode less interesting to me than the others.

As seems to be the pattern now, this week's episode follows five of the women around - Nicole Brown, Kodette LaBarbera, Emilie Blum, Tiffany Parros, and Maripier Morin - including a planned trip for two of them - Maripier and Tiffany - to spend time together.

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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.

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For the record, I loved the premiere of Hockey Wives. I watched it with focused attention (I closed both Firefox and my Twitter client), and with my knees clasped to my chest in delight. I know it's a manipulated reality show, and I still found it to be a fascinating look into the lives of a handful of women (there are ten on the show, but only five featured in the first episode) partnered to hockey players. That said, I think there's a lot of material there for critical commentary.

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