I am a firefighter-EMT on the west coast, and wasn't sure about this show going in.
My first thoughts were, "It can't be any worse than 'Backdraft'," and, "Please God, let this be better than 'Rescue Me'."
It's nice to see a show that doesn't make us all out to be lying, cheating, philandering d-bags the way "Rescue Me" did (although that show could always make me feel better about my own life...). This is not to say its characters are paragons of perfect virtue, but it does at least show them as worthy of the public's trust.
The station environment is semi-realistic. Of course, messing with the Probie/Candidate/New Hire/FNG/Boot is a time-honored tradition and rite of passage that all of us endured when we were new. However, the co-ed locker room is a stretch. Yes, we often share the same barracks with females, but we don't strip down for the shower in full view of the opposite sex. Just doesn't happen. Also, "incidents" like LT Severide sneaking into the gear room for a quickie with ANYBODY would result in serious disciplinary action.
The cast seems mostly believable to me. Eamonn Walker feels exactly like many chiefs I have known. Both LTs seem a bit young to be company officers, especially in a department like Chicago, but stranger things have been known to happen. The crews feel real enough.
The subplot that has LT Severide getting morphine from one of the medics is ridiculous. Every medication on an ALS ambulance is tracked, and the potentially addictive ones like morphine are watched like a hawk. They WOULD get caught, they WOULD get fired, and they WOULD do prison time for that.
As for the incidents, I am disappointed. The "medics" can't even perform basic C-spine immobilization for starters. I almost threw up in my mouth during the pilot episode when Dawson tells the little girl in the back of the wrecked car with head trauma and obvious mechanism of injury to turn her head. Any EMT student can tell you that YOU NEVER EVER DO THAT!!! I understand it's Hollywood, but come on, it's not that hard to show it done the right way. I'm a guy who has crawled inside a lot of mangled cars to pull people out; I know whereof I speak.
Many of the operations performed on incidents in the show are real, or at least close to it. Some people have criticized the "slide down the charged line" stunt. That is actually taught as a way to bail out from an upper-story window if you get trapped upstairs. I'm not so sure about suspending it from the truck's aerial the way they did it in the show. I'm an engine firefighter, and my truckie friends haven't gotten back to me on that one yet. However, I could think of at least two or three better ways to access that collapsed floor section. Some have also criticized the scene with LT Severide visiting the victim's widow to bring her his last words. I have had to comfort more new widows, orphans, and grieving parents than I care to think about, and it has kept me up at night. I don't carry my Iphone around in my turnout coat pocket, but this one is still perfectly plausible.
The third episode featured an overturned SUV teetering on a guardrail above a tunnel entrance with occupants trapped inside. I have experience with this type of incident (mine was on a steep hillside with the vehicle balanced on a rock). The stabilization methods they used on it would not have worked. Stabilization struts support an overturned vehicle, they don't hold it down, and placing cribbing on the guardrail would have done nothing useful that I can see. Then again, at least they sort of C-spined the kid from that wreck.
I'm unimpressed with the fire scenes so far. I've been inside lots of burning buildings. Most of the time, you're snake-crawling on the floor and you can't see your hand in front of your face. Multi-story apartment buildings with open stairwells can be a little different if the fire is on an upper floor, but not if you have fire established in the basement. If you take off your BA mask, you're probably going to die very quickly. If you stand straight up for more than a few seconds, your gear is going to fail and you're going to be in serious trouble. And while they did do most of the Pittsburg drill correctly to pull a downed firefighter out of the basement after the floor collapsed, they kinda forgot to pull out the other two guys who were down there, which is to say they only did part of the real operation. Also, they are way too clean. When you come out of a structure fire, you gear is filthy and so are you. You clean it when you get back to the station. So why do these guys come out looking like their turnouts just got dry-cleaned? I will give them this, they seem to be getting a little better in realism with each episode. I'm going to try to give this show a chance, as I think it's got some potential, though it certainly doesn't live up to "Emergency!", which to this day remains probably the most realistic Hollywood production about firefighters ever made.
If there's one thing I really hate about this show, it's the fact that after every episode I have to calm my fiancée down and convince her all over again that I'm not really cheating death twelve times a day. They do try to overdramatize the job. I get that, as I can attest to the fact that it's a lot more boring in real life (isn't everything?) and nobody would be that interested in a real day on the job, so I'm trying not to hold that against them.
