Rescue Me: Kansas (2004)

Rescue Me‘s central support system for Tommy Gavin is that of his family, and his wife is drifting away from him, saying he is no longer connected to reality. His children are growing up, etc. The wife wants to move away, to get out of the neighborhood of firefighters, where 9/11 has had a huge impact on the kids, the wives, the other firefighters. It all sounds fairly cliche, but Tommy’s attempts to hold onto the last thread of his family are brazen and amusing: outright bribing his children for information about the man their mother is dating, rooting through his car while he’s inside having dinner, etc. Another example of the crumbling support system that surrounds these characters lies in Lieutenant Lou’s poetry. It’s completely awful, but he’s expressing himself and when his wife finds out her firefighter husband has been writing poetry, she wishes he had been looking at porn. When he pleads with her to read it before he brings it into a PTSD group, let’s just say she never learned the sandwich technique employed in MFA classrooms around the nation.