Season 3 opens with the apparent fact that everyone from Bill to Eric to Sam to blah have done tons of abdominal exercises between the time Sookie ran into the bathroom to mull her future at the end of Season 2 and the time she ran out of bathroom to discover Bill had abandoned her. The recap was enough to remind me of how god-awful tired I became of this show with all that black-oil eyeball business at the end of season two, but things started out okay here. The vampires are more interesting. And now, werewolves too? Oh brother.

Here is a video:
Oh Sookie.

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.

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.

Rescue Me showed up on the queue under the mistaken impression that it was the firefighter show that filmed its headquarters in the Badge Building. Turns out that was a show from 1999 called Third Watch. This, rather, is a post-9/11 acerbic take on firefighters. It isn’t necessarily directly about PTSD, though it’s obvious a number of them are suffering, but it seems more because their respective support systems are corrupt and selfish. The central theme seems to be one where firefighters refute the Hero complex and that they’re only able to not be completely self-destructive when they’re in fires (not “at work”, as it shows that a large part of a firefighter’s day is about sitting around waiting for something to happen). Tommy Gavin, 14 months sober, begins seeing ghosts from his past – his cousin who died on 9/11, a girl with a kitten, so he falls off the wagon. It’s a good show – funny, and not quite as centered on the past as I thought it was going to be. I’m sure there’s a central scene coming up where they address 9/11 en masse, but it really does seem rooted in characters. Worth checking out on Netflix streaming, if you’re looking for something.

It’s kind of a shame that more often than not a show this good languishes in obscurity until its inevitable cancelation. But saying that is an easy thing, looking back. I’m not sure I’ve ever been invested in a TV show on the brink and been forced to reconcile that disappointment with what’s-not-coming.

Here, we’re forced to ask: really, that’s it? How could they have possibly stopped making this? It’s like a neurotic, real Saved by the Bell. Sometimes a little OTN or OTT, but what can you expect? The Apatow model in gestation: real characters that have space to breathe and the occasional overbearing morality lesson (though most often, it manages to resist the truly excessive).

Of course, that’s inevitable with a show that has its shelf-life written into it.