‘Tacoma FD’: Steve Lemme Teases Season 3 Finale: [Spoiler] Is Leaving?! (VIDEO)

Captain Eddie Penisi’s (Steve Lemme) dreams are about to come true when truTV’s firehouse comedy Tacoma FD reaches its fiery Season 3 finale… he’s about to become Chief.

Throughout the comedy’s history, Eddie and his brother-in-law Chief Terry McConky (Kevin Heffernan, Lemme’s fellow Broken Lizard comedy troupe member) have faced a familial — and familiar — power struggle due to the fact that Eddie’s fire commissioner father appointed Terry the Station 24 Chief and not his own son. “Eddie feels like, if Terry hadn’t married [Eddie’s] sister, he feels that he would have been the Chief a long time ago and that his father made Terry the Chief because he was doing it as a favor to his daughter,” says Lemme. “And Eddie has always lorded that over Terry, but it didn’t matter because Terry was the Chief and Eddie was not.”

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Now, the tables are turned, and Eddie’s about to get his due. In the exclusive clip above, Terry tells Eddie that he’s accepted another job and Eddie will, in fact, be his successor. “Of course he’s giving Terry a hard time about leaving the station, but as soon as he finds out that he’s going to be the new Chief, he doesn’t care,” Lemme says. “He’s glad Terry’s gone.”

Terry even gifts his in-law with the secret Station 24 Book of Knowledge, as seen in the clip, in a hilarious reveal. But no amount of knowledge is about to prepare these two for what’s coming.

In a sure-to-be-hilarious turn of events, Station 24 catches fire. Will there even be a firehouse left for Eddie to be Chief of? Lemme notes that the inspiration for the joke-cracking finale’s fire, like many of the show’s storylines, comes from real life. “We heard a couple of true stories from firefighters that every now and then — it doesn’t happen very often — there’s a fire at a fire station,” Lemme says. “It’s a big source of embarrassment and people get in trouble, and so forth. But [in this finale] there is a fire at our fire station, and Terry is leaving, and people are going to get in trouble. There are going to be repercussions for all of this.”

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Yikes. Thankfully, the workplace comedy has already been picked up for a fourth season on truTV. And though Lemme and Heffernan were aware that they had the pick-up while working on most of the season, you wouldn’t know it by watching this week’s episode. “The finale ends on a pretty emphatic cliffhanger and once you see it, you’ll realize that we actually kind of gave the network an opportunity to just end the show,” Lemme says with a laugh. “So we were kind of sweating that a little bit, but now it just becomes a really, really good cliffhanger.”

Don’t forget to check out the exclusive clip above, and tune in to see just how much damage will hit Station 24 and its inhabitants when the Season 3 finale airs.

Tacoma FD, Season 3 Finale, Thursday, December 9, 10/9c, truTV