Leaning on 9/11 for TV drama is a tricky business. If writers aren't dunking their characters into the sap of maudlin self-pity, they're building stiff action heroes who save the world moments after leaving the Mattel factory. So it's a small miracle that FX's "Rescue Me" skirts those obvious pitfalls of creating a weekly series out of the ruins of ground zero. Thanks largely to the presence of blowhard-par-excellence Denis Leary, who could be neither self-pitying nor unambiguously heroic if his life or his pack of cigarettes depended on it, it's one of the best series of the year.
Leary's 'Rescue Me' fights fire with feeling
The strange thing about writing about "Rescue Me," which premieres tonight at 10, is that it can too easily look generic and hokey on paper. Set in a New York City firehouse, it's steeped in the blue-collar macho culture that has thrived on mainstream TV longer than Andy Sipowicz has been losing loved ones on "NYPD Blue." Created by Leary and Peter Tolan, the team who developed a similar guy's-guys ensemble in the more comic "The Job" on ABC, "Rescue Me" delivers an instantly familiar group of tough-talking, Irish-American types who are the antithesis of the "CSI" brainiacs. The show's FDNY includes the hazed rookie, the troubled veteran, the grouchy Chief Reilly (Jack McGee), and the ladies' men who spend their down time pondering the mysteries of metrosexuality.
"It's like straight regular guys who get face lifts," one of them explains awkwardly in the gay-themed second episode, before indulging in a metrosexual luxury that leaves him with an inconvenient irritation. What's even more potentially stale about the series is that, like "Six Feet Under" in its more self-conscious moments, "Rescue Me" features a cast of visiting ghosts. Leary's Tommy Gavin has regular heart-to-hearts with his firefighter cousin and best friend, Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey), who died on 9/11 and whose image disappears when other people enter the room. Tommy also sees dead people who are strangers he couldn't rescue from fires, who haunt him with his own sense of failure. An overused device these days, the inclusion of ghosts can play like a writer's shortcut, a too-convenient means of access to a character's subconscious.
And yet, and yet. "Rescue Me" works remarkably well, particularly after the first episode, which gets clogged as it establishes too much too quickly. There are many funny moments in the show, including a few 9/11 jokes and a subtitled conversation in Episode 3 that clarifies the subtext in the banal phone exchange between Tommy and his father.
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