Somewhere in the annals of TV movie history, there’s probably a biopic with less dramatic frisson than Firefighter — maybe an early ’90s TNT original called Not Without My Dry Cleaning, starring Delta Burke as a desperate tourist who enlists the help of the American Embassy to liberate her captive chiffon blouses after misplacing the receipt. But I’m hard-pressed to think of one that takes as compelling a story as Cindy Fralick’s bid to become L.A. County’s first female firefighter and reduces it to yuk-yuk suspense over whether its heroine will ever learn to cook.
Nancy McKeon (Strange Voices), who plays Fralick, appeared in Afterschool Specials grittier than this (Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom and Schoolboy Father), but it’s easy to imagine that in 1986, only three years after its subject made history, a realistic depiction of the harassment faced by women in male-dominated fields was verboten. Instead, Mod Squad director Robert Michael Lewis and screenwriter Kathryn Montgomery (herself the co-author of two CBS Schoolbreak Specials) gave viewers and fire department spokespeople alike exactly they wanted: a kumbaya tale in which even the worst-behaved men aren’t that bad, and are handily outnumbered anyway by those who root for her success.
