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Red Right Hand: RESCUE ME?
*He is not a secret agent. Not at all.

 

RESCUE ME?

Less a title this year, more a cry for help. Denis Leary? What the hell happened this year?

I leave the dissection of the year, including the killed-off-characters to others who do it better and got there first anyway. I just want to quickly go over the fact that there was so much good material in the season that was simply not used.

The most irritating thing is that they seemed to be promising something very cool before the season began and it goes back to the hallucinations, the thing that really set the series apart when it debuted.

In the first year, Tommy saw his dead cousin, Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey).

In the second year, he saw the king of all hippies, Jesus Herbert Christ (Bernardo De Paula).

In the third year, the hallucinations started slipping away. There was some Keefe, but not much. Honestly, the show was starting to get away from me some in this season.

Prior to this fourth season, there were two awesome promos that ran. One featured Tommy getting the crap beaten out of him on a darkened New York street, only to reveal that his assailant was himself. The other featured Tommy hanging on to the back of a wildly veering fire engine tearing through the streets of Manhattan, then revealing the driver to be a smirking Tommy.



And while, yes, there was the shadowy figure who was finally and briefly shown to have Tommy's face, it was way underplayed and didn't do much. In fact, all those scenes probably added up to about three minutes.

So right there, I think that was a huge missed opportunity, to have Tommy continuously dogged by himself as much as he had been by his personal ghosts in seasons one and two.

The "ghost" of his Johhny (Dean Winters, well utilized on 30 Rock though) his cop brother killed at the end of the third season would have been good too, but he was also under utilized and his biggest contribution was to exhort Tommy to drop his son in the river, resulting in some pure shock value dangling that seemed to do absolutely nothing but attempt to get people talking, like the "rape/not rape" stuff from last year. That, was at least in character and affected the ongoing relationship with his ex. Baby dangling achieved nothing, save to point out how the show seems to be off the rails.

Then there was Tommy "haunting" 62 Truck wearing Keefe's jacket. All this seemed to do was show us a bunch of second and third string crew member's doubting their eyes. It looks like it may have some repercussions in the fifth season, but there's some question as to who might be watching the show at that point.

My favorite character, Kenny (John Scurti), was totally wasted this year in the revenge/cheating plot (after his ex-nun girlfriend (Susan Misner) fucked his cousin (Artie Lange)) that was stretched over most of the season but should have been a B or C plot in one episode.

If it were just bad, it'd be one thing, but the ingredients were all there...just -I don't know- the recipe was all FUBAR.

And they fucked up my spec.
©2024 Michael Patrick Sullivan
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