There are few TV tropes I hate more than the one where there’s a wedding and the characters involved suddenly realize that, shit, you guys, this is a bad idea, and then they don’t get married, and it’s kinda sad, sure, but everybody realizes it’s all for the best. I hate this almost as much as I hate pregnancy storylines that end in miscarriages. It’s a convenient way for a show’s writers to avoid dealing with the necessary status quo messing that comes from a marriage or a new baby. More importantly, this sort of thing almost never happens in real life. Even at the small, inexpensive weddings I’ve been to, even if it’s pretty clear the couple involved isn’t going to be together forever, everyone does their best to ignore this fact and just plunge on ahead. We want to be happy, so we’ll force ourselves to be, if only to prove the doubters wrong. There might be a moment of clarity, but that will be it. It’s deluded to think you’ll always be as happy as your wedding day – even for the best-matched of couples – but, hey, we’re humans. Delusions are where we live.
To Rescue Me’s credit, I don’t believe it’s ever pushed this trope on its viewers. The one wedding I can remember was the wedding between Maggie and Garrity back at the end of season three, and while that marriage ended disastrously, the wedding preceding it (immediately following the funeral for Tommy’s brother!) was one of the few genuinely happy moments on the show. It felt real and full of hope, as weddings do and should. And even though it seemed like the show might be heading this way with Lou’s marriage to Candy in “David,” what with Lou clearly having a few second thoughts and the guys all learning that Candy has quite a bit of money but wants Lou to sign a pre-nup anyway (and isn’t going to pay him back), it doesn’t. Hell, under those circumstances, I might have even bought that Lou left her at the altar. That’s a lot of new information to process, most of it worrying.
But, instead, the show just suggested that Lou wasn’t quite sure he was doing the right thing but had him go ahead with it anyway. Lou’s getting older, and Candy’s pretty hot. Are they completely well-matched? We haven’t seen enough of their relationship to really know, but their friends seem to think that’s not the case. Still, this is a situation where you take your chances and hope for the best, no matter how huge your doubts. The potential payoff is so big that you’re willing to risk the almost certain doom on the odd chance that you get just a few years of happiness or – the most remote chance of all – a whole lifetime of it.
Rescue Me, like almost all television shows, is a show about people who change but don’t, not really. All change to them happens in the circumstances around them. To be really glib about it, Tommy was the father to a son until the end of the second season, when his son died. Now, he’s still grieving his son. Any actual personal growth that occurs – like Tommy trying to get his alcoholism under control – is usually walked back fairly quickly because messing with the underpinnings of a hit show is too risky. You might kill off exactly what people love about it. So, yeah, Lou’s marriage is just a change in the circumstances around him. Even if Candy really loves him, he’s Lou, so he’s never going to stop doubting himself. But, most importantly, it’s a change in his circumstances that throws his central failings and struggles as a character into a new relief. Television, in some ways, is about expressing the same things over and over and finding new ways to express them. You can do worse than something like this.