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.

Notes on Pop Culture: Two Seasons of 'Breaking Bad,' 'Rescue Me' Battles Alcoholism & Army Mom Goes AWOL

Breaking Bad’s First Two Seasons

CliqueClack TV, a blog to which I contribute, has this nifty little feature called the “Virgin Diaries” where the site’s writers watch a TV series for the first time and write about it, giving readers who are already fans of the show the chance to re-live the show from the beginning.

In the past few weeks I've been writing about AMC’s Breaking Bad, the drama where Malcolm in the Middle’s Bryan Cranston plays anti-hero Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who’s diagnosed with lung cancer and starts cooking meth so that when he dies, he’ll leave some significant money behind for his pregnant wife and their 15-year-old son with cerebral palsy, as well as trying to make sure that the cost of his cancer treatments doesn't drive the family into bankruptcy.

The cancer, coupled with the drug making (he's a whiz at making pure crystal meth) awakens something dormant within Walt -- chiefly his confidence -- and he blossoms, going from a timid teacher (who had done Nobel Prize-worthy work in graduate school) to a cut-throat drug manufacturer.

My review of the complete first, seven-episode season is here, followed by my take on the first part of season two as well as the remainder of Breaking Bad’s sophomore season.

I was riveted by the first season while watching Walt transform, but I didn't find the second season as compelling as the first. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad, it was just . . . different, more depressing, as Walt’s personal life fell to pieces as he learned the ropes of the meth business and his partner coped with tragedies and struggled with his own appetite for drugs.

Rescue Me Battles Alcoholism

Speaking of depressing . . . the past two weeks of Rescue Me have featured the intense fear that Tommy Gavin’s daughter Colleen – who’s a raging alcoholic like her father – had died after going on a bender with Tommy (I was convinced that she was going to be found dead by the end of last week's episode), to this week's episode, where Tommy claimed he’s off the juice again and tried to drive demonic spirits out of his daughter by forcefully baptizing/exorcising her by plunging her face into a baptismal font which Tommy had filled with a priest’s stash of booze.

I can’t decide whether the show is going to try to sink Tommy to even lower depths – I don’t think he’s reached “rock bottom” yet, whatever one might call “rock bottom” – in his and his troubled family’s battle with alcohol, or whether it'll spend the remainder of the time trying to have Tommy climb his way out of the hole he's in. I also can't figure out where the writers are headed, and that's, I think, a good thing.

Army Wives and AWOL Moms

Recently Army Wives took on the thorny issue of what to do when a single parent is supposed to deploy overseas and his or her childcare arrangements fall through. Based on a true story of an Army cook who was threatened with court martial for failing to report for duty to go overseas after her mother backed out of taking care of her 10-month-old son, Army Wives tugged at the heartstrings, asking the question of whether this fictional AWOL Army mom should’ve been loyal to her job or to her child.

My column on moms in the military -- both on the Lifetime drama and what's gone on in the real Army -- was posted on Mommy Tracked this week.

Image credit: AMC.

Notes on Pop Culture: 'Rescue Me's' Dysfunctional Premiere, FNL's Toilet Bowl & the Army Wives Turned into Working Moms

Rescue Me's Dysfunctional Premiere

The headline for my review of the season six opener of Rescue Me over on CliqueClack TV is: “Rescue Me’s premiere elevated family dysfunction to new heights.” That about sums it up.

As I watched the episode unfold, I absolutely could not believe the antics of the Gavin family. From Uncle Teddy showing up at the bar where he’d shot his nephew four weeks prior as though it was no big deal, Eddy exploiting Tommy’s shooting as a great business/PR move (asking Tommy to lie down in between the chalk outline of his body from where he’d been bleeding on the bar room floor), Janet intentionally poking Tommy in the spot of his gunshot wound, the wild ride Mickey gave Tommy from the hospital, to the boozing Colleen Gavin, I came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the Gavin gene pool.

FNL’s Toilet Bowl



Loved the threads touched upon in the most recent episode of Friday Night Lights, "Toilet Bowl:" Julie feared disappointing her mother and failing to live up to her expectations when it came to college. (Julie was less than enthused about her visit to Boston with Tami, who acted as though she'd been added to the Boston College public relations payroll.)

Landry and Jess moved forward with their adorable, awkward budding romance, although it seems as though Vince is still carrying around a piece of Jess’ heart in his back pocket. Luke started turning into a Nurse Jackie/Dr. House drug addict, going through pain medication at such a rapid clip that he had to resort to getting the name of a less than honest doctor in order to score another prescription because the pain in his hip from that ranch accident is still intense.

The two biggest stories of the week: Tim Riggins found his own field of dreams and, after realizing he’s in no position, financially to buy it, figured it'd be worth it to join Billy in an ill-advised, illegal after hours chop shop operation at Riggins Rigs in order to raise the cash to become a property owner. Bad. Move.

And finally, the lowly East Dillon Lions netted their first victory. Huzzah for the Lions.

Have I said lately that I’m particularly enjoying this fourth season of FNL? Seriously.

Army Wives Turned into Working Moms

My pop culture and politics column over on Mommy Tracked this week traced the evolution of the wives on Lifetime’s Army Wives from season one, when only Joan and Roxy had jobs outside the home, to the current season, where all of them are employed, with the exception of Claudia Joy who’s going back to school to complete the law degree she abandoned when she married Michael.

I think Claudia Joy’s transformation from being the helpful, party-throwing, consummate volunteer wife to working alongside her law professor on a case against Fort Marshall has been the most dramatic, followed by EMT Denise and “rookie” cop Pamela Moran, who’s freshly divorced and once again pursuing her career.

‘Rescue Me’ Premieres Tuesday, Will You Tune In?

Last we saw of Rescue Me’s Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), he’d been shot by his grief-stricken Uncle Teddy and lay bleeding on the floor of the underground bar he ran with his firefighter buddies. Not too long beforehand, Tommy -- who’d given up on his hard-earned sobriety -- had been preaching to all comers that they should drink as much alcohol as they wanted, screw AA, Tommy said. However when Teddy’s wife died in a booze-fueled car wreck, Teddy held Tommy responsible for persuading everyone to start drinking again, thus the bar room shooting.

The sixth season premieres Tuesday at 10 on FX and I’m really interested to see what, if any, impact this near-death experience at the hands of his uncle has had on Tommy. If 9/11 rocked Tommy’s life, what would nearly dying do to him? Would there, could there be any real change? I’m doubtful.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure what to make of the two FX promos: The first one, “Cradle to Brave,” is a parallel portrait of two boys, one who grows up to be a professional baseball player for the Yankees (Derek Jeter) and the other who becomes New York City firefighter (Tommy Gavin). Something about seeing Jeter slowly drive by after Tommy risked his life to help a colleague out of a burning building, just felt odd to me as Alicia Keys sang “Empire State of Mind.” (Or maybe that’s just my reaction as a Red Sox fan.) Is this some sort of heroic equation, that Jeter gets cheers and accolades while Tommy gets a soot-covered face and is lucky to live to see another day?



The second video is a more traditional promo for the season as the words, “Sometimes you have to die to learn how to live” appear on the screen and Tommy is lectured about how not to let the “bad Karma” get the “upper hand on the good Karma.”



The New York Daily News wrote about the new season by saying that its first four episodes “build on Gavin’s collapse. He is haunted by his cousin’s death [on 9/11] and his own mortality. He’s also suspicious of his firehouse family, though they rallied to help his wife maintain their home when he recovered.”


Of the fifth episode of this season, series creator/writer/star Leary told the paper: “It’s an explosion of everything that’s gone on in Tommy Gavin’s life. It’s the bottoming-out of his alcohol addiction. It slips in time from past to present, constantly back and forth. It’s a really nasty episode. Everybody’s abandoning him.”

Are you looking forward to the sixth season?

'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.