Rescue Me: Season Five, Volume Two

With much of the 9/11 conspiracy theory chatter and the amusingly inappropriate Michael J. Fox storyline out of the way, the latter half of the fifth season of FX's hit series Rescue Me spends most of its time with alcoholic fire-fighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) vacillating between his anal retentive ex-wife, Janet (Andrea Roth), and his dead cousin's widow, Sheila (Callie Thorne). While screwing them both, and again hitting the sauce, Gavin manages to find time to spark up a romance with a very forthright Kelly McPhee (Maura Tierney), whom he meets at the site of a fire. Between extended sex scenes and occasional blow-ups, the women dole out a little text-messaging venom to each other, leaving a recovered Garrity (Steven Pasquale) to ask the question: "what's a cunf?" As Garrity suffers an orange penis, Kenny (John Scurti) takes up with Candy (Milena Govich), the ex-prostitute who claims to have cleaned up her act. Unfortunately, this storyline runs thin, much like Franco's (Daniel Sunjata) dalliance with a possible lesbian. Sure, these plotlines exacerbate firehouse male ego clashes, offering up an amusing episode involving a brawl between a group of bull dykes and fire-fighters, but they tend to peter out with little warning or logical closure. Really, all we have here is a bunch of relationship drama bickering between Tommy and his harem, and many aimless conversations between the guys, wherein they analyze Jennifer Aniston's ass, find creative ways to look at a Russian immigrant's vagina and weigh in on their Dancing with the Stars picks. A natural rapport between cast members certainly keeps these sequences vital but often they run too long, becoming repetitive in the process. Indeed, this signifies a show losing steam, even with a rather insane season finale involving gunfire. But even this deflated version of the series proves more interesting than most male bonding epics, if only because it's more candid about its agenda. Included with the three-disc, 11-episode set are many deleted scenes, a gag reel, a brief "behind the scenes" featurette and a 40-minute roundtable dinner discussion. Even though the dinner discussion features some seriously lame questions from the "fans," many insights and humorous titbits are dropped, making for an entertaining watch. Perhaps the most negative aspect of this box set is that it's only half of the season. This obnoxious trend needs to stop.