As you faithful readers of this blog may know, Rescue Me on FX is one of my favorite shows. It’s gritty, hard-core and hilarious. It stars Denis Leary who was up for a second Emmy this past year for his role as Tommy Gavin.
It’s definitely a disturbing show at times that deals with a lot of hurt, loss, addiction and heroism. It’s weird to have a guy like Tommy who is so filled with loss and pain, totally addicted to alcohol (sober though for quite awhile), yet who is such a force as a firefighter.
The writing and Leary’s acting is what really makes this show what it is. I usually have no idea where a story is going because they put such a unique, harsh twist on everything. You can think something is sure to happen, because you’ve seen it 100 times on other shows, but then it totally flips on you, or else you weren’t even watching what you thought you were.
I’ve pimped the show enough, so on to the great news.
It’s been renewed for a fifth season, which is awesome in of itself, but also the episode count has been increased to 22. The past four seasons were only 13 episodes in length, so this is a big boost for the show.
Barring the WGA strike that could affect it, Rescue Me starts filming again early in 2008 and will be split into two cycles over the 22 episodes.
I watched all of the first season of “Rescue Me” and loved it. I watched about halfway thru the second season and then lost interest. Mostly because it turned into a soap opera (i.e. who’s sleeping with who) and they got away from the firefighting stuff, and the ghosts of the fire victims that would follow Tommy around. That was the stuff I found interesting - the challenges of being a reluctant “hero”, a tortured firefighter, etc. They had some interesting tortured, complex characters. It was a shame they got ridiculous with their plot lines. Have they returned back to some of that stuff?
Yeah, they did. I think I felt the same way that season, but I stuck it out and it got really, really good.
The whole sleeping around thing…I think it still occurs, but I’ve never thought about it like that. There is a lot of stuff involving their son, his brother, alcoholism, etc.
The third season was fantastic and the fourth pretty good too.
I never thought of it like a soap opera really…but I guess it’s like that…
A funny scene occurs in season 4 when Tommy and his wife sit down with a shrink to talk about their problems…and once they are done, he laughs and thinks he’s part of some practical joke.
It was a great scene, and does kind of show that they have a LOT of stuff happen to them