It’s sitcom about a fire station in Tacoma WA starring Broken Lizard’s Steve Lemme and Kevin Heffernan. I think it’s pretty funny, straight in your face humor with a decent cast and creatives ideas. One of the funniest episodes featured a signer for the deaf having to translate the contents lost in a fire at a sex shop (see spoilered link below). The most recent episode featured guest star Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano.
Pantoliano may be back because he’s playing the Fire Commissioner and father-in-law to Heffernan’s Fire Chief, who is the brother-in-law of Lemme’s Fire Captain, and father to fire fighter Hassie Harrison, a relative newcomer to the screen.
This is in the 2nd season. I’m getting it on the truTV channel, I don’t know how widespread that channel is but if you can catch this you should.
This season they also have an after-show with the cast and crew discussing episodes, all from there homes now. Pantaliano participating in that was a real gem.
Oh lawdy yes, the werewolf episode made me laugh so hard I thought I was gonna break a rib or something. Hilarious show, especially when you get it uncensored.
Thanks to @Darren_Garrison’s bump, I noticed this thread, and started watching the show on Max.
A couple eps in, it hasn’t really been LOL funny for me so far, but amusing enough that I’ll keep watching. Kevin Heffernan reminds me a little bit of a poor man’s John Candy.
This season has been good, but not up to the season 2 standards. Terry and Ike are still the funniest characters IMHO.
Unnecessary nitpick - I’m pretty sure Terry should be a Captain, and Eddie should be a Lieutenant, not Chief & Captain as they are. A Captain is the boss of a single station, and a Lieutenant leads a shift. A Chief runs the entire department, or at least a subsection of the department.
Still watching but as @muldoonthief says it’s not as good as previous seasons. I think they need less of the fire station bickering and better stories about their fire fighting and cat detreeing activities which involve more characters outside the their group. Or just better scripts in general. I think Steve Lemme is too into his character and not allowing it to be more useful in the story. Hefferman has been a little more flexible but the character is too clownish.
It’s lost a couple of steps since the first season, which was only good enough for a start. I’m watching it, but not expecting much out of it anymore. It doesn’t seem to be a big budget affair so maybe they’ll survive, I’m not holding out much hope, even if improved I don’t think it’s getting much notice.
I had no idea it was back on. I’ll have to check it out.
Oddly enough, I was just thinking about it a few weeks ago and, on the assumption the series was over, I started rewatching Sirens. It’s no Tacoma FD, but it’s still pretty good.
I got Mrs. solost into the show after watching the first two eps on my own. It was the perfect ep to start her on, since it was the intro of the Lucy character. Before that the show was a sausage fest (as Lucy herself called the station), and Mrs. solost might have bailed if she had started from ep1.
We just finished the Halloween ep in S2, and those are always fun in decent sitcoms, as the writers have a good time with those. The station gets a call to a Haunted Mansion attraction that’s also supposed to be haunted for reals, and they all end up facing their individual fears. The ‘Hall of Hands’ segment was a hoot, and ‘Silence of the Rams’ was pretty funny too. I was relieved that they didn’t go the cheese route and try to introduce an actual supernatural element at any point. I also appreciated the fake-out with the dog-- the chief seems like he’s softening, then says “get rid of it!” Was a nice twist from a “heartwarming” ending in a cheesier sitcom. Though it made me a bit sad, too-- how do you not keep such a good doggo?
I’ve only caught one episode of this show. It was kinda meh; I won’t seek it out, but I won’t avoid it, either.
For those who’ve seen more of it, do they ever do anything actually Tacoma-specific? Any location shooting, or stock footage of Tacoma; or even any reason to think the producers even know where it is?
I had forgotten that she wasn’t there from the beginning. She’s an important part of the cast dynamic. I haven’t seen the earlier episodes since they first aired, probably need to schedule a rewatch.
I took this photo from the parking garage next to my building in downtown Tacoma earlier this year.
That fire took all day for them to put out. It was an abandoned warehouse. There should be plenty of footage they can use. Tacoma gets its share of fires!
I don’t remember any scenes with it raining, besides the occasional stock shot of the station house with some digitally added rainfall. It’s obviously filmed somewhere in southern CA.
Season one had several scenes at the stationhouse where, as you say, there’s an outside shot of the building with added rain, and then indoor shots with sound effects of rain falling and thunder in the background. Sometimes they commented on it, saying “slow day-- not many fires when it’s raining”; sometimes it was just background noise and they didn’t even comment on it. So they did pay at least the barest lip service to the notion of “Washington State: Often Rainy”.
