Back again

Rico says one of his favorite television shows, Rescue Me, is back for another season. There's a review by Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times:

It has never seemed entirely a coincidence that in the years since 9.11 the dead have maintained a heightened presence on dramatic television, haunting and comforting and emboldening the living as ghosts and dreams and symbols of inextinguishable memory. On a series as absurd as Ghost Whisperer or as chilling as Medium, the departed communicate from the beyond to help in righting the wrongs of the breathing and malfeasant. And on shows as whimsical as Monk or as formulaic as The Mentalist, the detectives in charge are motivated by a ceaseless sense of mourning. Each has endured the murder of his wife, and both shows are in part testament to the improbability of closure in the face of profound tragedy.
What is implied elsewhere is confronted aggressively in the terrifically restive FX drama Rescue Me, which begins its fifth season on Tuesday with Tommy Gavin (played by Denis Leary, the show’s co-creator) still being chased by his apparitions and demons and no closer to approaching serenity. As the most frantic and emotionally undone member of the crew of 62 Truck, at a New York City firehouse, Tommy was hardly finished working through his guilt and grief over his cousin’s death during the 9.11 rescue mission when he was forced to deal with the loss of his son, killed by a drunk driver. At the end of last season Tommy’s unloving father died as well, and it isn’t too long before he is turning up in Tommy’s vodka-induced visions, Tommy’s hold on sobriety as shaky as a timid child’s on horseback.
The specter of 9.11— never completely submerged but sometimes obscured by the show’s elements of comic soap opera— is in the foreground again, as another crew member begins to espouse the theory that the attacks were orchestrated by neoconservative nut cases bent on American global domination. Franco (played by Daniel Sunjata) is doing some of his espousing at protest rallies, but largely mouthing off to an infuriatingly sanctimonious French journalist, who is applying her less-than-realpolitik worldview to producing a coffee table book about the attacks. Perched in the firehouse with her steno pad, wide-leg trousers, and Euro sensuality, she rampages right through the conflict-of-interest chapters of journalism ethics manuals and produces a one-woman argument for bringing back the term “freedom fries”.
Rescue Me seems to come by its reverse class condescension so honestly that it hardly even seems to matter when it begins to feel too broad. Mocking the urbane, the materialistic, and the aspiring, the show last season had Tommy breaking the expensive crystal of an on-again, off-again girlfriend, a 9.11 widow who had cashed in, claiming she couldn’t possibly move into a Manhattan apartment with the junk she had in Bay Ridge.
Loving its own kind, the show reserves its harshest judgments for the entitled, the uptown moneymakers inspiring our collective rage and, here, caricatures that function on a Trading Places level of genius. Unbeknownst to Tommy, his ex-wife, Janet (played by Andrea Roth), has sent their youngest daughter to boarding school in Connecticut, where the girl has told friends that her father is a hedge fund manager and her mother is a fashion designer and that they all divide their time between a loft in SoHo and a house in Montauk. Eventually visiting her for a school play, the couple discover that she is speaking and carrying herself as if she were a character out of J .P. Marquand and learns that the other parents, fat hags and male submissives in pastels, don’t really consider Queens and the Bronx part of New York City. One mother eyes Janet’s dress and offers that her cleaning lady has the same one.
In the show’s equalizing calculus, hot sex is meant to be the great revenge of the working class, the stuck-up presumably having no idea how to get it on. Forced to share a room in a stifling bed and breakfast during their Connecticut stay, Tommy and Janet end up leaving no inch of their quarters without trespass, breaking a few drawers and a bathroom door during a reunion that could inspire an entire Penthouse letters page. Back home Janet has been having her own good time with an unemployed guy in a wheelchair, played with an antic and scruffy lunacy by Michael J. Fox, who provides only further reason not to let the current season pass by.

Rico says he has no intention of missing a single show...