Rescue Me: Gay (2004)

Rescue Me‘s theme this week is gayness in all aspects of the firefighters lives. Tommy sees gays everywhere – his cousin’s widow is being a little too intimate with a woman, there’s a “geek” vs. “gay” diatribe about Tommy’s godson, and some hilarious moments with Sean and Mike, the two youngest firefighters in the house, who try to teach the rest of the house about metrosexuality. The chief’s big problem with the retired firefighter who came out and proceeded to out a number of the firefighters who died on 9/11 presents the show with a homophobic rhetoric that originates in the characters: they simply cannot fathom a gay firefighter where they can’t even get to a place in their head where “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a possibility. He sits in a gay bar waiting to confront the firefighter for hours and doesn’t even realize where he is. A more typical episode of television, where everyone has their threads in the plot and they all interweave. One thing that impresses me about Rescue Me is its very difficult to pin where the commercials are. The scripts have an even tempered feel to them and there’s not a constant rising of tension to keep someone seated through the commercial break. If anything, there’s a quiet moment before the slightly longer fade-to-black and then when it comes back, it drops you into a fire or something elevated. It works much better when separated out from that teaser, act i-a, act i-b, act 2-a, act 2-b formula that so many other shows are devoted to in total.