“Dysfunctional Family Dinner”, “Setting the Backfires of Season 5”, gag reel, deleted scenes

I hate when studios split seasons. It’s a way to get more for less and, what’s even worse, it ticks off fans. “Rescue Me” saw its season run double to 22 episodes for its fifth season which probably justified (at least in their minds)breaking up the season into two sets of 11 episodes each. That would probably have worked if we were dealing with, say, two different story arcs (as happened with a lot of “Battlestar Galatica” seasons) or if there were a major cliff hanger and a couple of months separating the two. Neither is the case here though and while “Rescue Me” did have good momentum beginning with season five by the middle of the year, it lost much of that and seemed to be treading water. In a nutshell I guess you could say that sometimes more is less and “Rescue Me” (much like the second season of “Battlestar Galatica” or any other series that expanded into full seasons after previously running less than 20 episodes) season five is an example of diminishing returns. ***

Tommy STILL faces the dilemma of two women he cares for Sheila (Callie Thorne) the widow of his cousin and his wife Janet (Andrea Roth) and finds that his pal Lou’s (John Scurti) comments about juggling two women means that he’ll fumble one of them and he’s the one that will get hurt in the process. Lou has his own issues though with the hooker (Milena Govich) that he fell for and tore his heart (and his pocketbook conning him in the process) apart steps back into his life.

As with previous sets we get a fair amount of deleted scenes that were cut due to time constraints. ***

We also get two featurettes “Dysfunctional Family Dinner” borrows from an idea for an extra in the “Firefly” set from a few years back; Leary and writer Evan Reilly sit down with many of the actors have dinner and talk about the show with questions and ideas contributed to fans. It’s actually nice to see something like this being attempted again. ***

“Setting the Backfires of Season 5” focuses on the stunts for the show which I seem to recall in slightly altered form on the first season set. We get a gag reel which is a nice plus for any set.

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