TV is the New Reading

At FX, one light goes out, another switches on -- same amount of dark

The run-up to the fifth-season finale of “Rescue Me” featured a number of satisfying things.

Firefighter Kenny “Lieu” Shea conned a former call girl who he’d fallen in love with a couple seasons ago and who’d disappeared with his life savings. She returned, claiming an inheritance from a dead uncle and swearing to him that she had changed and wanted to get married.

So they got married -- which then gave him access to the joint checking account. Which he proceeded to clean out, reclaiming the money that had been stolen from him in their first encounter and splashing out for vibrating chairs and flat-screen televisions with the rest.

When she confronted him in his glorious new apartment, he allowed as how as it turned out there was some residual anger left over from their last encounter, how he’d tracked down her real name and her “dead uncle” -- who was very much alive, by the way -- and how the money was from the victim of her latest scam. And in that she was wanted by the law for her various crimes, all he had to do was call the cops.

The female troubles continued, not just with firefighter Tommy Gavin’s wife serving him with divorce papers or his lover, Sheila, his late cousin’s widow, cuffing him to the bed and threatening him with her usual brand of crazy, but with Janet and Sheila confronting his side-interest Kelly, played by Maura Tierney, to warn her about Tommy’s craziness and getting into a knock-down drag-out fight with each other on the way out. This got Kelly mad at Tommy, who set fire to Sheila’s anti-psychotic meds and left her cuffed to her bed.

At which point he headed (where else?) to the bar and everyone was there -- the Gavin family AA group, which Tommy a few months ago effortlessly shoved off the wagon.

They were gathered to mourn the loss of Ellie, Teddy’s wife and a member of the group, who a few days before had gotten drunk, drove through a red light and got T-boned by a semi. Teddy went off the deep end with guilt, and in his despair identified Tommy as being the reason everyone’s life is miserable. Tommy, he said, was surrounded by death and destruction but nothing bad ever happened to him.

So he put two rounds in Tommy’s shoulder and as season five came to a close, he forced everyone to maintain a macabre vigil, not allowing anyone to leave or call for help as Tommy bled out on the floor of the bar, and the lights got increasingly dim.

Well, in terms of a criticism I’d had about this series, it’s hard to suggest in this instance that the abuse of alcohol was portrayed as consequence-free. But dark as this was, I don’t know if you can call it a cliffhanger. When “Rescue Me” returns -- which it should, by the way; the 22-episode fifth season pulled off some of the best writing, dialogue and acting in the history of this dark dramedy, and revitalized a series that was starting to wander -- it will all but certainly center on Tommy. And while this show has featured lots of ghosts, it’s hard to believe he’d spend the rest of the series as one.

‘Sons of Anarchy’

That explosion you heard Tuesday was the second-season premiere of “The Sons of Anarchy” on FX blowing out the backs of TV screens nationwide.

A truly annoying leftover storyline from last season -- an internecine biker assassination and subsequent frame-job against a rival gang went horribly wrong and took up way too much time in the second season premiere -- was entirely eclipsed by the arrival of neo-Nazis, played with intriguing depth by no lesser actors than Adam Arkin as Ethan and Henry Rollins as A.J., who ripped the lid off his “Sons of Anarchy” debut with a three-man sexual assault on Katey Sagal as Gemma, SAMCRO biker club president Clay’s consort and best friend’s widow.

The appearance of the neo-Nazis in the town of Charming, Calif., is covertly supported by corporate interests, although it makes the economy of Charming a little hard to understand. Either Charming is some sort of city where there are hospitals and commerce and county fairs and everything, or it’s a few dusty shacks on a dusty road someplace in which a biker gang in a storefront garage running guns for the IRA is pretty much the only business going on.

Since the gang is the focus of the story it could seem that way, but a confab between the sheriff and a developer suggests otherwise. So the idea is to pit the true-believer neo-Nazis against the Sons of Anarchy, let them destroy each other and then, I suppose, put up a bunch of strip malls and condos, although I couldn’t imagine anyone buying one there.

In this case, it’s better to let the flimsy premise stand and let the drama play out.  I do know that following Gemma’s attack, there will almost certainly be a howling and not especially measured retaliation -- especially since Gemma can identify her attackers.

The new season of “Sons of Anarchy” is off and running again starting at 9 p.m. Tuesdays on FX, and viewer discretion is urgently advised.

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