Once in a Lifetime

It's not too late to get in on Lifetime's summer hit "Army Wives."

In fact, it looks as if the war in Iraq will be going on long enough to serve for several more seasons of the basic-cable prime-time soap opera.

"Army Wives" has become the most popular series in Lifetime's 23-year history, attracting 3.6 million viewers a week, because it's gone well beyond the channel's usual chicks-in-jeopardy dynamic.

Oh, the women in "Army Wives" are still in danger, mainly of losing their husbands to deployment who knows where. Yet there is a lot more to the series than that. Its characters are well-rounded, and while it focuses on women's issues -- one of the main subplots involves a pair of pregnancy scares, and another concerns adultery and the acceptance of it (or not) by other women -- the drama is fairly authentic. It's the most popular Lifetime series ever because it's easily the best Lifetime series ever, not that that's saying much.

"Army Wives" runs the 13th and final episode of its debut season, "Goodbye Stranger," at 8 p.m. Sunday, and -- without giving anything away -- it aims to make sure viewers come back when it returns next year by ending on a killer cliffhanger. Yet along the way it also simply looks at the relationships surrounding several couples about to be separated.

Terry Serpico's Maj. Sherwood, Drew Fuller's Trevor LeBlanc and Jeremy Davidson's Chase Moran are all being shipped out, most likely to Iraq. Worse still, munitions have disappeared at Fort Marshall, and terrorists are suspected, so their deployment has been moved up. This causes concern for Catherine Bell's Denise Sherwood, Sally Pressman's Roxy LeBlanc and Brigid Brannagh's Pamela Moran. They have different ways of coping. Denise throws herself into work as a newly registered nurse, Pamela concentrates on her radio talk show, "Have at It," and Roxy, well, Roxy is about to renew her vows with Trevor in a tender scene designed to melt hearts.

Otherwise, the three commiserate with their other gal pals at the Hump Bar, the base watering hole. Former "NYPD Blue" star Kim Delaney is the biggest name in the cast as Claudia Joy Holden, mother to Kim Allen's Amanda, who is about to break up with her Army beau in order to go off to the University of Virginia, but Delaney is as stiff as ever. It's the other actresses who bring "Army Wives" to life.

Brannagh's Pamela gives an on-air speech that's full of cliches. "All we can do is trust," she says, "because the only way to stop the fear is just by living … seize the day, we live while we can … and that, my friends, is how we all beat terrorism. Have at it." Yet she's so earnest and believable, she gets by, and the same can be said for the rest of the cast (Delaney aside).

Understand, "Army Wives" isn't great. The cliffhanger ending would seem to suggest that adultery is even more dangerous than terrorism. But it's at least a respectable melodrama, and that's a first at Lifetime.

For those who like the old Lifetime, there's always "The Murder of Princess Diana," a new made-for-cable movie debuting at 8 p.m. Saturday. It exploits the 10th anniversary of Diana's death as the stuff of a fairly routine murder mystery, and unlike "Army Wives" it's not believable for a second.

Jennifer Morrison of "House" stars as Rachel Visco, an American reporter working in London in 1997. She has become an unabashed Di watcher, explaining to her editor, "Celebrity is the new power," and she scores an assignment to follow Di to Paris.

There, the vast quantity of various security officials lurking about, each with his own agenda, makes her suspicious, and she confides this to an old flame, Grefori Derangere's Paris policeman Thomas. "There's something off," she says. "I just can't put my finger on it."

When Di and her hotel-heir boyfriend go flying off into the Paris night in a car, Rachel simply hops on the back of a paparazzo's motorcycle to give chase.

"What are you do-een?" he says.

"I'm going along," she explains.

When Di's car crashes, Rachel tells the paparazzi to split. "Put your cameras down!" she screams. "These people need help!"

Later on, she asks Thomas, "How could this happen?"

"Eets trageek," he agrees.

Yet she also knows the paparazzi were only trailing the car and had little if anything to do with the crash, which makes the party line blaming the photographers a mystery -- one that deepens when Thomas is yanked off the case as well. When Rachel discovers Di might have been pregnant -- seemingly providing a motive for the royal powers that be to have her rubbed out -- Rachel's laptop is stolen, and her editor's London office is burgled. Before long, Thomas is getting beat up on the street.

"All I could theenk about was you," he says as she treats his injuries.

"Me, too," she says, cueing the obligatory sex scene.

Wait a minute. A princess has apparently been murdered; let's stay on point here people, shall we?

Before long, "Murder" descends to full-scale chick-in-jeopardy mode, and I for one was rooting for the conspirators to bring it to the quickest possible conclusion.

"Army Wives," by contrast, has an open run, as seemingly endless as the war in Iraq. The good thing about that is the only surge it has recorded has been a rise in Lifetime's Nielsen ratings.