Warsh again. When Jonah asked me to pinch-blog for him, I immediately knew I would write about Rescue Me. It’s a show I first saw two months ago, and I immediately loved it. Last night’s episode was a crazy one, as usual filled with both hilarious situations and incredible drama. I know, you’ve heard that before. I’m no Wordsworth; I can’t really adequately describe how funny the show is, or how moving it can be, but I’ll do my best to give examples from tonight’s insane episode and relate them to aspects that capture the whole show. While both introducing a show AND writing about a 4th season episode requires an effort I really don’t feel like giving after a long week of work, I will do it for you, and for the sole reason that if I can get you to watch this show, you will love it, and need to watch every episode, and will have a tremendous amount of respect for me and my opinions, enabling me to feel haughty.
“HOT!!”
I think the first time I found out about Rescue Me was when I saw that quote, represented above in its entirety, and the tagline: “Denis Leary stars in a new FX dramedy.” I immediately dismissed it as a terrible show that I would never watch. There wasn’t a hint of hesitation. I moved on with my life, retaining only the knowledge of the show’s existence in case, somewhere down the line, I needed to pretend to like it because some hot girl, or the VP, mentioned it or something. I probably should say that 100% of my opinions of Denis Leary prior to this show came from “The Roast of Denis Leary”, something I saw on Comedy Central 4-9 years ago. Leary was ridiculed for 2 hours about his Pennzoil commercials and his horrendous acting by vindictive B level comedians, so naturally I decided to never watch anything with Denis Leary in it. A perfect example of the well thought out opinions and measured statements you can look forward to in the rest of this post.
Tonight’s episode started with the longest slow motion scene I have ever seen in my life. It was all the guys of “62 Truck”, the “house” of Tommy Gavin (Leary, far left) and his fellow FDNY firefighters, or as they refer to each other, his brothers, running into a blazing inferno. As they pull up, someone drops a baby from an upstairs window…this fire is clearly bad. They all run in, and, in slow motion, look around through the smoke to find people that need saving. The fire scenes in this show do a great job of making you feel like you are there, but saving someone from a fire is a slow, clumsy, increasingly dangerous by the second process. As the guys struggle with their helmets, oxygen tanks, and the people they are saving, you can feel the tension as the fire gets worse and worse. The best part about the fire scenes is Tommy. He’s the Michael Jordan of firefighters. While up on the crane in this fire, he throws his helmet through the 3rd story window of the building, then dives over the 5 foot gap, into the broken window, to save the woman who lives in the building. Living with her are 7 babies, all of whom die in the fire. A very somber opening to the show to say the least. Usually the show’s opening is something lighter, but there have been some sadder openers too. One of my favorite parts about this show is the theme song, and the perfect timing of it every single episode. The producers know exactly how long to wait for it, and after an especially ridiculous opening, they’ll always show a great ending shot, extended for a few seconds, before the song kicks in. (The song is “Come on, Come on” by the Von Bondies).
Before I go on, I should talk about two parts of the show that are major themes, and while not essential to understanding this episode, are backdrops for the whole show. Five guys on Tommy’s truck died in the 9/11 WTC attacks. The opening scene of the pilot is Tommy addressing a class of Probationary Firefighters (Probies) as they graduate from probie school and get ready to join a truck. His speech is haunting, and set on a pier with a great view of the NYC skyline. Tommy constantly feels survivor’s guilt, and is fighting a nasty drinking habit. He also has another minor oddity – he imagines dead people talk to him, and he talks right back. There is a lot of this in the pilot with his cousin, Jimmy, also his best friend, who died on 9/11. On occasion, he also sees and talks to other people who have died, some of them characters we know, some people that died before the time the show started. The theme of 9/11 is huge backdrop to the show. The danger of these guy’s job does not escape them – they barely have life plans. You hear things like “If I burn up in a fire, I want to make sure my kids can go to college”. In particular, the “hero worshipping” after 9/11 is mentioned, as is the lack of respect the guys feel the world went right back to giving them as soon as some time had passed. The talking to the deceased is worked in as normally as possible, and there is way more of it in the pilot than in any of the rest of the episodes. It’s weird at first, and honestly, there are way cooler “talking to dead people” scenes than in the pilot, but don’t let this strange facet throw you if you start to watch the DVD’s. It’s a daring move by the show, and constantly serves as a reminder that Tommy Gavin is one incredibly screwed up guy trying to keep his life together. Since I mentioned the rare somber opening earlier, I want to share my favorite opening scene. Somewhere in the middle of Season 1, the opening is a hazy memory of the guys on the ground floor of one of the World Trade Center towers. They are all getting ready to run up the stairs to help people out of the building, until a woman comes out of the staircase, stumbling and coughing violently. The chief tells Tommy to help her back to the truck for first aid, and he protests before being forced. The memory fades back into reality as Tommy looks back at his brothers heading up the stairs, the last time he’ll see their faces, or any part of their bodies for that matter. The memory ends and we see Tommy sitting alone, in his car, at a traffic light that was red when he stopped but had since turned green. The guy behind him is wailing on his horn. Tommy gets out of the car, walks back to the guy, and kicks the crap out of him. He yanks open the guy’s car door, punches him in the face about 10 times, and throws him to the ground. Cue the theme song.
Tonight’s episode had the usual balance of the guys either at the firehouse or out somewhere all together, and the guys dealing with the women in their lives. The women on this show are gorgeous, but to even describe their relationships to the characters throughout the show’s history would be giving things away that I wouldn’t want to spoil. What is important for this episode, however, is that Tommy’s ex-wife Janet (Andrea Roth) recently had a baby boy, who screams his head off whenever she holds him, but is perfectly quiet for everyone else, making her believe that she hates him. She is worn out from raising her and Tommy’s older children, his daughters (one a high school senior, one early middle school) and son Conor (Elementary school age). She is breaking down and starting to drink, and taking worse care of the baby. Jimmy’s (Tommy’s friend who died) wife Sheila (Callie Thorne) has no husband, and her only son just went off to college, so now she is very lonely and wanting a baby. She has offered $200,000 dollars to Tommy in exchange for the baby.
The comedic goldmine of the show is the firehouse. I liken it to a frat house, but with a somberness and some danger hanging over it. It even has its own pledges (the probies, who are called only “probie” and do things like build an entire deck while the rest of the guys sit around and drink beer). The probie on 62 truck is Mike Siletti (Mike Lombardi, 4th from left). He is unbelievably stupid. He is also the most ambiguously gay character I have ever seen – yes, even more ambiguously gay than Claire’s friend on Heroes. Unlike Claire’s friend, who never does anything, Mike does things…strange things…things that you can watch 100 times and still question what exactly his sexuality is. His partner in stupidity is Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale, 3rd from left). Dumb as a rock, Sean is a young, good looking firefighter. One of my few gripes about the show is how stupid he is, and how sometimes you know that he’s obviously going to say something completely idiotic. It doesn’t happen often, but either Sean or Mike will have one scene in almost every show that displays their ignorance. It usually is hilarious, but sometimes I find it repetitive. Sean’s best friend is Franco (Daniel Sunjata, 2nd from left), a Puerto Rican firefighter and the biggest ladies man in the house (or pretty much anywhere on TV). Franco is a great character – hilarious, suave, and with personal issues that he deals with the best that he can. Lets just say that in season 1, his old girlfriend from 5 years ago shows up with their 5 year old daughter, that he has no idea about. It throws a wrench into his womanizing ways just a bit. My favorite Franco story line is when he starts dating a girl with a retarded brother…who yells out the N word at random times. Great stuff.
Tonight’s episode had two moments that stood out for me as typical Rescue Me humor. At one point, the new chief (played by the guy who played Hesh on the Sopranos) came out for a normal conversation – except about a minute in he noticed his fly was open, quickly fixed it and went right on talking. There are hilarious throw ins like that all over the show. Later in the episode, my favorite character on the show had a nice moment. Ken Shea (John Scurti, far right) is the Leutenant, so the guys call him Lou. Well, at an inter-firehouse basketball game (the earlier seasons featured numerous FDNY-NYPD ice hockey games, this was the first basketball game), where Lou is coaching the team, whose star is the new, much sought after, basketball star probie that he convinced to join 62 truck by giving him the deal of no cleaning, and no being called “probie”. Tommy blatantly ignores this deal because he hates basketball, which he sucks at, because it interferes with Hockey, which he is good at, and treats the probie like any other. After the game, in wide entrance hallway of the gymnasium, Ken’s girlfriend is begging to get back together with him. She claims to be 35 on the show, but this girl could be Mischa Barton’s barely older sister. She’s like 24. She also used to be a nun in training. (Apologies to all my fans out there in the convent for not knowing the real name for nun in training. You know i love you all) By the way, Ken is 45 and overweight, with a huge mustache and droopy face. Anyway, she’s obviously not a nun anymore, and when Ken insists on breaking up (because she cheated on him with a relative of his), she says she;ll be needing back “the whip, the handcuffs, the edible underwear, and the blindfold” Ken gets a classic, “i have no choice but to say this” look on his face and defeatedly tells her “I ate the edible underwear”, as the rest of the house turns from their conversations to listen to his. You can count on ridiculous comedy like that out of every single episode of this show. In fact, I would say that its the funniest live action comedy on TV right now (I think South Park is perfect). Also, I promised myself I would say this so I’ll just throw it in here: John Scurti, Emmy for best supporting actor, next year. If you watch season 3 of this show, my favorite season and so good that I was completely addicted and engaged and had never seen the first two seasons, you will see Scurti’s masterful performance as a guy barely hanging on to any shred of dignity.
Back to the end of the episode. Tommy has taken the baby from Janet, and driven next to a secluded spot by the river. he places the baby, in its carseat, on a bench a couple feet away from the fence that protects people from a 20 foot drop into the river. He thinks through his situation, how if he leaves the baby with Janet it will have a life with no love in it, and if he gives the baby to Shelia then Janet will take it back out of spite, he is faced with what he thinks is his only recourse. He takes the baby out of his carseat, walks over to the fence, holds the baby over…and the episode ends. I immediately watch the scenes from next week…Tommy walking into Janet’s apartment and her asking where the baby is, drilling him with questions. So the question is, did Tommy kill the baby? That may seem like an asinine question, along the lines of “I wonder if someone will actually die this week in Heroes” or “I wonder if this scheme to get off the island will work” in Lost. TV shows don’t have their main characters kill babies. But, on Rescue Me, a show that has already seen its main character kindasorta, possibly rape somebody, you can’t count anything out. This show is great, and I recommend it to anyone who can handle classless womanizing, some crude humor, and some heartbreaking moments. Let’s just say I’ll be anxiously tuning in next week.
