About three years ago, I joined most of the rest of humanity and got cable. Dish Network, specifically–great stuff. But it was about that time that I pretty much stopped caring about what network TV had to offer. It seemed like they could never put out much that wasn’t already available. Thus, when I got my hands on a box set of the second season of Third Watch on DVD, I found myself pretty surprised by what they saw.
Third Watch, so named for the period of time between three and eleven PM, follows the lives and adventures of various cops, firefighters and paramedics in the world of first responders. And as they tackle situations of every size and variety, from the small ones of people with a penchant for dialing 911 over the least little thing and killer parakeets run amok to the nigh-apocalyptic of cop-killing snipers and kidnapping victims buried alive, we discover that life isn’t all about chasing perps and patching wounds. These people who we call heroes are just as human as the rest of us. They make decisions, just like we do. They have tragedies, just like we do. And over the course of several months, we’ll get to see a lot of them.
Third Watch is a strange little animal. It manages to do two things, and equally well. It manages to humanize the men and women of the police, fire and rescue departments of New York City, and it also manages to regularly annoy the viewer with more schmaltz than a chicken ranch. In case you’re wondering, schmaltz is both the Yiddish word for chicken fat and a colloquial term for maudlin sentimentality, at least one of the two is well represented in Third Watch.
The worst part of it all was how differently this show would make me feel WITHIN episodes. They would literally manage to make me glad I was watching, by putting in something really exciting or something funny or even just something interesting, and then they would proceed to blow all that solid good feeling by doing something so cheesy in an attempt at a tearjerker moment that I couldn’t help but be put off.
There’s a lot to like here–if you were fond of shows like ER and NYPD Blue and suchlike, you’ll probably be into this one. The real advantage is that it manages to combine several different subgenres–it’s part cop show, and part doctor show, and part firefighter show and even some comedy and drama thrown in for added flavor. The only real problem with it is that some times they’ll jack up the drama a whole lot more than I care for myself, to where it goes past a slight extra flavoring and into an overpowering force that just goes way too far.
But if you’re okay with that sort of thing–if you can handle a little extra drama in your television, and if you like cop drama and firefighter drama and medical drama with just a little extra slug of comedy and of course that extra heaping helping of drama–then you’ll definitely enjoy Third Watch.
Season two will hit your DVD players July 7th.
