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Series / Tacoma FD

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Let's get this shift started

Tacoma FD is a truTV comedy series starring Broken Lizard's Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme.

The show follows the misadventures of a firehouse crew as they get into all sorts of scrapes while working in the wettest city in America.

This series provides examples of the following tropes

  • Action Girl: Lucy is a college judo champion and the only real fighter in the firehouse.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Ike and Andy are horrified to learn that their special coffee is made by force feeding a jaguar coffee beans and then forcing an elephant to eat the feces by sewing its trunk to the jaguar's anus. An elephant's trunk is for breathing and not connected to its esophagus in any way.
  • Ashes to Crashes: In the Season 3 finale, "Fire at the Fire Station", Edward Penisi, Sr. confuses an urn containing Andy's grandfather's ashes for something valuable damaged in the fire, and dumps its contents onto the ground while berating the team (despite Andy's crying while gathering the ashes in his hands).
  • Bait-and-Switch: Terry wistfully stares at a photo of himself and Lucy when Lucy was a little girl. While it initially seems that he's sad to think of his daughter growing up, it turns out he's actually admiring the muscular body he used to have.
  • Big Eater:
    • Eddie brings a competitive eater as a date to a family dinner. She orders one side of the menu as her appetizer and the other side as her main.
    • Ike is willing to eat anything for the right price, with "The Penisi Way" having him genuinely consider eating things like rhinoceros dick and an entire puppy.
  • Brain Bleach: Lucy is horrified to learn that her father is nicknamed "Tuna Can" because his penis is wider than it is long.
  • Breaking the Fellowship: The Season 3 finale, "Fire at the Fire Station", ends with Granny upset that nobody bothered to try saving his stuff and leaving the team, Terry preparing to depart for a new job, Eddie fired by his own father because having a station burn down on his son's watch is bad PR, and the rest of the team unsure where they'll be stationed now that Station 24 is blown to smithereens. The Season 4 premiere focuses on the fellowship getting back together, with Eddie being the most reluctant to return.
  • Broken Pedestal: Season 4's "The Penisi Way" starts with Eddie's grandfather Giuseppe, who codified The Fireman's Code of honesty and trustworthiness, getting posthumously respected by the city by having a street named after him. Then during some cleanup at the station, the crew finds a trunk owned by Giuseppe Penisi containing art he'd stolen while putting out a fire at a museum. Although Eddie's father initially wants him to burn the evidence, he ultimately can't bring himself to violate the code and reveals it to the public, costing them the street name...only for The Tag to reveal it was a forgery set up as a prank on his own family.
  • Casual Kink: Andy enjoys being dominated and deliberately antagonizes his ex-girlfriend so that she'll continue bullying him.
  • Coitus Uninterruptus: While evacuating an apartment complex with a potentially-deadly carbon monoxide leak, the crew encounter a couple who, uh...fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
  • Couch Gag: The first season rotated through a number of opening title sequences:
    • Lucy knocking Andy's helmet away.
    • Andy waving at the camera.
    • Eddie, Ike, and Gran smacking each other in the groin.
  • The Cracker: In "The Penisi Way", Ike accidentally gives out too much personal information while trying to sell some stolen art the crew finds on the dark web, leading to hackers harassing the station, draining his bank account, and revoking his US citizenship.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: The crew respond to a residential lockout, where a beautiful brunette in revealing sleepwear tells them she accidentally locked herself out of her house. The crew get the door open for her, and fail to notice her pulling her ex-boyfriend's Trans Am out of the garage, dousing it in gasoline, and lighting it on fire.
  • Embarrassing Tattoo: Season 2 episode "Lucy Wants a Friend" has Lucy trick another girl firefighter into transferring to Station 24 so she's no longer the only girl there. Feeling bad about it later, Lucy learns that the other girl was tricked into getting an embarrassing tattoo by her new squadmates on C-shift, so Lucy gets a matching one as solidarity...only to learn that the other girl's tattoo was a fake, in order to trick Lucy as revenge after finding out about her causing the transfer.
  • Gambler's Fallacy: Lucy gets herself into trouble this way. Luckily it's with the rest of the crew, so Hilarity Ensues rather than somebody coming to break her legs.
  • Groin Attack:
    • A Viagra overdose at a nursing home requires the crew to aspirate a priapism, by drawing blood from the erection with a syringe.
    • One episode features Eddie and Granny responding to call after call in which men need help extricating their dicks from random objects.
    • Terry once saved Eddie‘a life when the latter was knocked out by a ceiling collapse, but he herniated a testicle in the process.
    • Eddie and Andy play "Tennis Balls", which is where the players throw tennis balls at targets placed in front of their opponents' balls. They invite Lucy to play, but she declines because of differences in anatomy.
  • I Banged Your Mom: Eddie likes using this trope to get a rise out of people. Especially since it often turns out to be true.
  • Interservice Rivalry: The TFD and TPD hate each other with a passion and they've gotten into violent feuds in the past.
  • Intoxication Ensues:
    • Ike gets bitten by a woman high on a potent form of ecstasy and he ends up tripping balls and thinking he's becoming a werewolf due to the saliva contaminating the wound.
    • The crew is called out to a fire at a marijuana dispensary and they end up getting high due to the burning product.
  • It Runs in the Family: The arrival of Eddie Penisi, Sr. (aka the Tacoma FD Commissioner) in Season 2 reveals that the Penisis are a long line of horndog firefighters. This tradition goes back by at least a century.
  • I Was Quite a Looker: Terry used to be very fit before gaining a large amount of weight.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: The Tacoma FD commissioner is an overbearing jerk, but his criticism that Station 24 A Shift's unprofessional and poorly written incident reports reflect badly on the department is valid.
  • Kiss of Life: Eddie does it with a cat.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Whenever Ike and his twin brother Mike, the script and blocking do everything but scream that Gabriel Hogan is playing both characters thanks to split-screen techniques.
    Mike: We like to stay inside our own quadrants, y'know? Isn't that right, Ai-ai?
    Ike: We have quadrants and we just stick to them.
    Lucy: Seems kind of like a cop out, but whatever.
  • Noodle Incident: The Feud of 2006. No details are given but Terry, Eddie, and Jerry all reveal nasty-looking scars.
  • Oddly Small Organization: Station 24 consists of a single engine company of a captain, engineer, firefighter (Lucy soon becomes the second BLS firefighter on the crew), and firefighter-paramedic. They also cross-staff an ambulance. Terry acts more like a company captain rather than a battalion chief while Eddie prefers to be one of the guys rather than a leader.
  • Oh, Crap!: A frequent source of humor.
  • Papa Wolf: Terry tries to act this way sometimes, (trying to ban hazing when his daughter Lucy is first assigned as the station's new probie) but Lucy calls him out on preferential treatment, preferring to be a part of the team.
  • Parental Sexuality Squick: Inverted when Lucy starts talking about vaginas or losing her virginity and Terry will rush out of the room. Played straight just as often, such as when Terry and Vicky flirt in the firehouse and Lucy has to rush out of the room, or when Lucy hears that her Dad's nickname - Tuna-Can - refers to his penis being wider than it is long.
  • Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: The Tacoma FD commissioner (who's also Eddie Penisi's father) runs roughshod over Terry's rules simply because he can overrule them.
  • Smurfette Principle: Lucy is the only female on the crew. For propriety's sake, she's given a separate corner of the shower with a small dividing curtain, although this doesn't stop her from taking part in the crew's shower shenanigans.
  • Trash the Set: The Season 3 finale, "Fire at the Fire Station". In addition to the titular fire causing some major damage, Wolf's attempt to "prove" it was Eddie's fault leads to a gas main exploding, blowing up the rest of Station 24. The Season 4 premiere focuses on rebuilding the set, with a few updates.
  • Unfortunate Names: Season 4's "The Probie Imbroglio" has the crew hire a new probie named Andy Mickleberry solely due to his name, even though he's incompetent at actual firefighting.
  • You Say Tomato: The Penisis (including Vicky and Lucy) drop the final vowel of Italian words, which indicates the family immigrated from southern Italy where the dialects are stress timednote .
  • Working with the Ex: An arson investigation puts Andy and Salazar together.

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