Saying Goodbye to 'Rescue Me'

As Rescue Me fans gear up for the series finale next week, I can’t help but feel sadness at the conclusion of this complicated, uneven, edgy but unquestionably button-pushing drama that plumbed the depths and sadness of 9/11 like no other piece of pop culture.

Though I gave up on the show for a season and a half – I was very put off by a scene late in the third season where Tommy Gavin sexually assaulted his estranged wife Janet – I returned for the fifth season and have remained a loyal viewer since. I’ve even been reviewing it for CliqueClack TV for the past two seasons.

This final season has been incredibly powerful, from its somber reflections on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 – how it’s being exploited, how it is still such a raw wound for many – to the depiction of firefighters facing their own mortality, ever aware of the dangers they walk into when they attempt to save someone who’s inside a burning building.

Tommy Gavin’s come full circle, from the crappy, alcoholic, selfish, wounded husband and emotionally AWOL father, to one who appears to have finally given up the booze, embraced his responsibilities as a husband and father and who can finally take a pass on temptations that come his way. He's made his peace with those around him (thanks to his buddy Lou prematurely delivering heartfelt letters Tommy wrote to be distributed to his family and friends in the event of his death).

Which of course means Tommy’s got to die, right? Well if you go by the second-to-last episode (I reviewed it here) it seems as though Tommy and his whole crew may (emphasis on may) have died in a warehouse fire (which reminded me of the 1999 Worcester fire, the one in which Denis Leary’s firefighter cousin and childhood friend perished as they entered a building intent on saving the people they thought were inside).

Who knows what lies in store for the finale next Wednesday night, whether Tommy Gavin will live or die, along with his brethren. Either way, I hope the series finale will be respectful of the show, the characters and the audience.

Image credit: FX.

'Rescue Me:' Having a Great Fifth Season

I've been extremely impressed with the fifth season of Denis Leary's gritty firefighter drama Rescue Me on FX. It's had more than its share of insanely dark moments, from Tommy Gavin (Leary) announcing to an AA meeting that not only had he resumed drinking but that he was enjoying it, to Tommy seeking to prove that he wasn't dead inside, that he still had tears left to shed, because he could feel his thigh being scorched by a blow torch. There's been Sean Garrity's (Steve Pasquale) kidney cancer, which was thought to have been caused by the rescue work he did at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11.

But there have also been ample moments of humorous awkwardness:

-- The unorthodox back "treatment" at the chiropractic offices.

-- The we're-so-happy-and-a-walking-Talbots-ad charade Tommy and Janet Gavin (Andrea Roth) put on when they visited Katy's super-snooty boarding school, including Janet's kick-ass verbal take-down of the insufferable snobby parents.

-- Michael J. Fox's turn as Janet's psycho, violent boyfriend Dwight who gave new meaning to the word "ball-buster."

-- The sheer illogic behind the Janet-Tommy-Sheila (Callie Thorne) sex-with-no-strings troika that's bound to blow up at any moment. Seriously, not a single one of them is completely sane. I predict major ugliness by the end of the season.

-- Shawn (Larenz Tate) has been trying to woo Colleen Gavin (Natalie Distler), despite her, shall we say, daunting amount of sexual experience which initially turned him off. (Do you seriously want to know what was up with the peanut butter?)

-- Can't forget Garrity's drug-induced song-and-dance fantasies, where he donned a top hat and tails and belted out show tunes, as he lay in a hospital bed after his cancer surgery.

However it was the return to 9/11 as the source of many of Tommy's issues which have grounded this drama, returned it to its raison d'etre. The presence of a French journalist in the firehouse, pressing people about their recollections of that day and inquiring about its lasting impact, stirred the pot. The sexy French journalist, over whom Tommy and Lou fought, handed Tommy a DVD with some 9/11 footage to review. While watching it, Tommy realized that his cousin died when the second tower collapsed, not the first, because he saw Jimmy, alive in the footage. Later, as he and the writer were sitting in a restaurant overlooking Ground Zero and discussing the loss of his cousin that day, Tommy ordered and drank a scotch, poignantly leaving his one-year sobriety chip inside the glass.

In that moment, Tommy decided to resume his drinking ways. His lunatic Uncle Teddy (Lenny Clarke) only made matters worse when he told Tommy that the best way to come to terms with Tommy's father's death was to watch a DVD (again with the DVD) of family home movies with a big scotch and have a good cry. However when Tommy couldn't cry, he worried that he'd become devoid of feeling in the wake of 9/11 and the deaths of his son, his brother and his father, hence his drunken application of a blow torch's flame to his bare thigh, so he could feel something, literally and emotionally.

After the "Torch" episode, the most disturbing of the Rescue Me installments this season, the show didn't flail around in hopelessness. The very next episode was largely devoted to the guys from the firehouse breaking the rules in order to give kids battling cancer some joy by bringing fire trucks to the hospital where Garrity was recovering from cancer surgery. When a kid with absentee parents took off with the rig and Tommy chased it down in the department SUV with a "cancer kid" named Timmy riding shotgun, there was an essence of gallows humor when Timmy, who said he knew he was going to die from cancer, told Tommy that after that thrilling car chase, he could now die, satisfied.

What have you thought about Rescue Me's fifth season? How does it compare to previous seasons?

Image credit: FX.

'Rescue Me:' Darkness, Descending

This season's Rescue Me on FX has gone back to where it all began: 9/11. Or, more precisely, to, what Denis Leary's character Tommy Gavin this week dubbed, "What happens after."

What has lured me to the show again, after having left it for a few seasons, was this very development, its revisiting of the festering wound that hasn't yet fully healed. A French journalist working on a 9/11 book is serving as a catalyst who's rekindling nightmares anew as dramatized in the person of Tommy. Even after his son has been killed, his marriage has withered, his father has died, his resistance to alcohol has faltered (again), Tommy continues to willingly face the killer flames of fires to save people all across the city -- to rescue complete strangers -- but hasn't made peace with the ghosts of 9/11 who continue to haunt him.

While last week's episode wasn't as emotionally heavy as this week's (Sean Garrity's secret cancer diagnoses notwithstanding; Janet confronting the mean middle aged moms was fabulous, by the way), this week's installment has drawn viewers literally into Tommy's darkness with him, where the ghosts of his past taunt him, call him a coward for what he did or didn't do on that historic, horrific day. How his climbing back into bottle and facing his dead relatives is going to play out, I surely don't know, but it's been damned riveting this far.

Image credit: FX via the Charlotte Observer.

Rethinking 'Rescue Me'

I abandoned Rescue Me in June 2006 following a controversial scene involving what I saw as Denis Leary's deeply flawed and tragic Tommy Gavin character sexually assaulting his almost ex-wife Janet. Some argued that it wasn't an assault, given their troubled relationship, but the scene really bothered me nonetheless. Though at the time I adored the show for its button-pushing dark edginess, that scene was too dark. I said I wouldn't watch the show again.

And I haven't.

But, as they said in the Godfather, when I thought I was out, I feel like I'm being pulled back in. Now that the series is gearing up for its fifth season (premiering tonight on FX at 10) and reviewers are saying they're going to get back to the essence of the show -- how New York firefighters' lives are impacted by not just the danger they face everyday, but by the events of 9/11 -- I'm finding myself tempted to tune in once again.

The New York Times review of the first few episodes of this new season, in particular, make it sound as though it will be intriguing on multiple fronts, including political and socio-economic. Reviewer Ginia Bellafante wrote:

"As the most frantic and emotionally undone member of the crew of 62 Truck, at a New York City firehouse, Tommy was hardly finished working through his guilt and grief over his [firefighter] cousin's death during the 9/11 rescue mission when he was forced to deal with the loss of his son, killed by a drunk driver. At the end of last season Tommy's unloving father died as well, and it isn't too long before he is turning up in Tommy's vodka-induced visions, Tommy's hold on sobriety as shaking as a timid child's on horseback.

The specter of 9/11 -- never completed submerged but sometimes obscured by the show's elements of comic soap opera -- is in the foreground again, as another crew member begins to espouse the theory that the attacks were orchestrated by neoconservative nut cases bent on American global domination."

So, I'm thinking I may go back on my three-year-old vow and tune in tonight, just to see where the character with whom I once sympathized -- Tommy Gavin -- is in his post-9/11 journey.

Are there any shows you USED to watch that you started watching again after taking a season or more off? Are you looking forward to the new season of Rescue Me?

Image credit: FX.