Footballers Wives - The Complete First Season Review

The UK's wildly popular TV show Footballers' Wives plays rather like a dramatization of the worst bits of In Touch magazine, or more specifically, Britain's Heat, fuelling our obsession with worshipping at the celebrity altar. In essence it's Dynasty set in the world of premiership football (or soccer in the U.S.), though you shouldn't be fooled by the title: this is definitely not a "game of two halves". For the first time in history, men may leave the room at the mention of football to let the women gorge themselves on a surfeit of bad fashion, affairs, drug habits, long-lost children and the gratuitous disposal of excessive wealth.

There are more than a few recognizable characters--the foreign manager, the glamour-model wife 151d , the smoldering Italian mid-fielder--whose presence only adds to the (intended) impression that this just might be fact thinly disguised as fiction (though it's unlikely that any real footballer's wife would almost kill the chairman of the club in a fit of rage, as Tanya does in the first episode). Unsurprisingly Footballers' Wives was created by the same team that produced the UK TV trash-fest that was Bad Girls and despite never being a contender for best drama it offers a perfect opportunity to become a voyeur in a world with more glitz and leg action than most. . --Nikki Disney