All Fired Up

By James Poniewozik

Denis Leary is not a guy you associate with putting out fires. He lights them--the small, contained blazes at the end of the cigarettes he chain-smoked through his angry, comic diatribes, like the one-man show No Cure for Cancer. Yet here he is, backstage at the set of his new TV series, in a New York City fire-department (F.D.N.Y.) uniform, picking at a plate of chicken with rice and beans, talking earnestly about his cousin Jeremiah Lucey, a real-life fireman in Worcester, Mass.

One night in 1999, Leary says, Lucey "was filling in for another guy as a favor. He was scheduled to drive. He went to another guy on the crew. He said, 'You know, I hate to drive. I want to go in. If we get a call, I want to switch with you.'" They got a call--a raging warehouse blaze that killed Lucey and five other men. "There was no regret in it," Leary says. "It was what he did. When he was alive, he'd tell his parents and anyone who asked, 'If I die, you're just going to have to deal with it.'"

Rescue Me (FX, Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T., debuts July 21) is about dealing with it--"it" being death, individual and multiple, the death that came for your buddies before and the death that may come on your next shift. There's nothing amusing about the show's inspirations--Leary's personal loss and the aftereffects for the F.D.N.Y. of losing 343 fire fighters on Sept. 11, 2001. And yet it is not just one of the most moving but also one of the funniest shows you will see this year: a sort of post-9/11 M*A*S*H.

Leary (also a co-writer and co--executive producer) stars as Tommy Gavin, an F.D.N.Y. veteran with a disturbing habit of talking to his cousin, fellow fire fighter and best friend Jimmy (James McCaffrey)--disturbing because Jimmy is dead, killed in the World Trade Center collapse. Jimmy left no remains behind but a finger--"My beer-opening finger," he complains during one imaginary visit with Tommy--and since then Tommy has been unable to go into a fire without taking a hit off a flask. (Tommy's alcoholism, curiously, did not dissuade Miller beer from a sponsorship deal that includes product placements and paying for the debut episode to air commercial free.) His marriage has fallen apart, and his wife is dating. Unwilling to let her go, he gathers his three kids around the kitchen table, breaks out a roll of bills and announces "a little game" wherein they can win cash by giving information about the new boyfriend. "But Mom doesn't want us to talk about that," his youngest daughter says. "I understand, sweetheart," replies Tommy. "That's why we have the money."

The comedian's work has always been a bitter mix of drama and humor. But Rescue Me is also about how an all-male subculture handles vulnerability and loss--or denies it. Tommy's squad brusquely refuses the help of a city psychotherapist; counseling here is a bigger taboo than in the Soprano family. Lou (John Scurti), a fire fighter who expresses his grief by writing poetry about 9/11, guards this secret closely, with good reason. When his wife finds out, even she begs him to destroy it. "I don't need you to share," she says. "I love you the way you are. So get rid of these."

Tommy is a lot like Leary's previous TV character, a self-destructive Irish-American cop on the ABC sitcom The Job. That show debuted in spring 2001 and then ran smack into the aftermath of 9/11, when TV executives were not exactly eager to air unsentimental treatments of public servants. But FX is a different network, a cable channel trying to distinguish itself with controversial series like The Shield and Nip/Tuck. And it's a different time: now New York City fire fighters have been making the news for infractions that involve drinking and drugs and for suffering budget cuts.

Rescue Me may sound disrespectful on paper, but really it's the opposite; it respects the characters enough not to patronize them or soft-pedal their sarcasm, flaws and political incorrectness. At the firehouse, for instance, well-meaning bureaucrats have installed a fire alarm with the automated voice of a woman. "That voice," Lou says with a sneer, "is the closest thing I'm ever gonna come to working with a broad." When the house gets assigned a rookie named Mike, the veterans complain that there are already too many Mikes in the department--Mike the Mick, Guinea Mike, Mike the Wop and so on.

According to Terry Quinn, an F.D.N.Y. veteran and a friend of Leary's who serves as a consultant on the show, the bigoted ball busting is part of a firehouse culture in which guys constantly probe one another's weak spots, something TV's lionization of fire fighters tends to overlook. "Shows like Third Watch are corny, formulaic soap operas," Quinn says. The Rescue Me team is conscious of being more real, more unsparing, morewellcable. Looking over posters for the ad campaign backstage, Leary rejects one that has the main characters in uniform, lined up, gazing upward. "Too heroic," he says. "That looks like a CBS show."

The fire scenes too are unlike anything you've seen on TV or in the movie Backdraft: there are no fireballs--in fact, few flames at all--just a lot of smoke and confusion. That, Quinn says, is closer to fire fighters' real experience--navigating by sound, disoriented and sometimes encountering bizarre scenes, as when Tommy breaks through a door and is jumped by a naked junkie with a baseball bat who thinks he's after money. Quinn says the scene was taken from real life, as was a call Tommy's squadron gets to an apartment building where a tenant has poured dozens of jars of his urine down the stairs.

Sometimes Rescue Me's humor and drama clash, as in the pilot, when the affecting penultimate scene--Tommy drinking alone at the beach, being joined by the specters of his cousin, other 9/11 casualties and two kids who died while Tommy was trying to save them--is undercut by a scatological punch line. But the nervous dance between the two is generally fitting for nervous times, when the warm consensus that followed 9/11 has faded but the anxiety has not. Rescue Me's firemen are processing mixed signals ("You're heroes! You're bums!"), much like the rest of us ("Duct tape your windows!" "Go out and shop!"). They--and the country--are on edge, the place where Leary has spent most of his career. "These guys deal with life and death every day," he says, finishing his lunch. "They walk past memorials [to 9/11 victims] every time they walk into the firehouse. They have to be able to laugh, or they'll fold in on themselves. It's a hell of a job. Hell of a job."

Then he heads back toward the set, pulls out another cigarette and fires up.