Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Shirts and skins

Morning of press tour day three. In case you missed it in the comments to the last post, the Shannen Doherty cry-fest was followed by Dan Rather getting choked up no less than four times during his press conference with Mark Cuban about his new HDNet gig. (Oh, and after I wrote that blog entry, I bumped into Cubes at that night's party; turns out we weren't wearing exactly the same shirt, but close. "I think I have that one in my room," he told me. "Do you want me to go back and put it on?")

Because the noteworthy stuff like Rather happened too late in the day for the print edition, I jumped the gun on a few reviews for next week, including Sci-Fi's "Eureka," a sort of "Northern Exposure" with mad scientists, and the new and improved ESPN version of "The Contender" (no stupid obstacle courses, no Stallone or Jackie Kallen, etc.).

I watched the first two-thirds of "Rescue Me" before I had to go do some work. Some very funny stuff, especially Lou eating the spinach dip off Garrity's face and Garrity's entire sleepwalking odyssey. But I hear the last 20 minutes were strange, and dealt more with The Incident. Feel free to comment on anything in the episode, and I'll find out from a friend who watched the whole thing what I missed.

"Rock Star" comments later, after I've hopefully gotten the MSN video clips to work.

8 comments:

Adam said...

I was a big fan of the first season -- all your criticisms are correct, but it was such great storytelling and casting. I give big credit to Mark Burnett, because the production values of the show were impeccable.

And there's no purer immunity challenge than two guys swinging at each other with their families watching.

Alan Sepinwall said...

Oh, I'm with you. I loved season one. But the good stuff was so good that the flaws were even more glaring -- especially after guys like Joey started injuring themselves doing stupid stuff like dodgeball.

Anonymous said...

In the last 20 min. of Rescue Me, Tommy & Johnny's ex went to some restaurant where a friend of Janet's & Sheila's worked. They pretended to be all hot for each other because the ex knew the friend would immediately call Janet. Problem was that Tommy was getting aroused by the fake kisses and ass-grabs, and the woman wasn't calling anyone. They were briefly interrupted by the ex's ex, a guy named Sebastian who is stalking her and who Tommy threatened (it was pretty funny--the guy is short and cowardly, though the ex says he's scary, so I guess that might come into play later).

Anyway, they fake making out on the sidewalk and the friend finally calls someone. Then Tommy almost immediately gets a call from Janet, who wants to meet him in 30 min. She comes over, ostensibly to talk about Colleen's problems at school, then reveals that she's wearing nothing but sexy lingerie under her trenchcoat, forces him onto the couch, rips open his shirt and screws him. It's very quick and aggressive on her part (she was annoyed when she first came over that he didn't give her a "hello" kiss, too). Then she mentioned what Colleen had been doing and asked Tommy to help his daughter. Janet puts on her coat and leaves after saying "Payback's a bitch." It was definitely a puzzling comment and made me wonder if he did give her chlamydia and maybe she was giving it back to him.

The ex calls Tommy to find out what happened with Janet, and he says there's no way she knew they'd been at the restaurant making out. The ex wonders who the friend called. Cut to Sheila in her kitchen having a complete meltdown, kicking the cabinets and breaking things and threatening to kill Tommy & the ex.

Previews for next week look a bit scary where Sheila is concerned, but the promo monkeys played it up as Tommy being chased after by the three women because he's so damn hot or something (ick).

Edward Copeland said...

The Janet-Tommy encounter was odd -- I think it was meant to ape what he did to her, especially with her line "Payback's a bitch" but again it was filmed as though both were enjoying it. Scurti was again the highlight.

Adam said...

Does tv get better than Ahmed v. Ishe from season one?

The challenges were lame, but you could FF past them (and thus not hear Sugar Ray's narration). But during the fights, they used angles and brief slo-mo shots to make clear who was winning each fight, which was awesome.

Anonymous said...

Okay, I just started watching "Rescue Me" regularly a few episodes ago, so I am a little unclear on some of the relationships. Is Sheila one of Tommy's ex-girlfriends?

Alan Sepinwall said...

Sheila is both Tommy's ex and the widow of Jimmy Keefe, Tommy's cousin and best friend who died on 9/11 and has haunted Tommy ever since. (He's the tall, skinny ghost with the spiky hair who pops up all the time to torment Tommy, most recently in this episode in the middle of the fire.)

Anonymous said...

Poor Scurti, his talents are wasted. Tolan doesn't appear to know how to get himself out of this one. I await the future episodes, or as someone said, the tv movie of the week or the feature film based on the tv show where the 'payback' might be, which sets all this right.