Denis Leary and Peter Tolan’s drama about a New York firehouse after 9/11 is coarse, funny and braver about grief than most films about that day. It runs out of ways to break Tommy Gavin, but the first three seasons earn your evening.
Rescue Me was created by Denis Leary and Peter Tolan and ran for seven seasons from 21 July 2004 to 2011, ninety-three hours of television about one New York firehouse and the men in it who did not die on 11 September 2001. It is good, and for three seasons it is better than good. It is also a series that finds one thing it does well and does it until we could set our watch by it.
What it does well is talk. The firehouse kitchen, where the crew eats, argues and waits for the bell, is the best room the show has, and the writers, Leary and Tolan chief among them, with Salvatore Stabile, Robert Krausz, Stephen Belber and Michael Caleo on the staff, fill it with the sort of talk men use to avoid saying anything. John Scurti’s Lou is the heart of it, a lieutenant who has taken up poetry since the towers came down and reads the results aloud to a room that cannot decide whether to laugh. We laughed. Then Scurti let something cross his face and we stopped, and that turn, from joke to grief and back before anyone can be caught at it, is the whole series in a minute. Daniel Sunjata, Steven Pasquale and Mike Lombardi fill out the table with a womaniser, an idiot and a punchbag, and each is given more than that label over time.
Leary is not a subtle actor and the show does not need him to be. He is a talker, quick and mean and self-pitying, and Tommy Gavin is built to those measurements. In the first episode he lectures a room of new recruits about the 343 firefighters who died in the towers, and we expected the speech that usually goes with that number. What we got instead was a man bullying boys so he would not have to cry in front of them, and it got at us more than any tribute has. The dead cousin, Jimmy, follows Tommy around like a flatmate, and the series treats him not as a horror device but as a nuisance, which is far more unsettling. The ghosts here want a chat.
The fires are short and dark and mostly smoke. The directors, among them Jace Alexander, John Fortenberry and Tolan himself, shoot them close and confused, so that we rarely understand the layout of a building any better than the men crawling through it, and nobody comes out backlit. Christopher Tyng’s score keeps out of the burning rooms almost entirely. The series is not interested in fire as spectacle. It is interested in what a man is like at the kitchen table an hour after he has been inside one.
The women are the problem, and it is a problem of writing rather than acting. Andrea Roth’s Janet and Callie Thorne’s Sheila are given almost nothing to want except Tommy, and they spend seven seasons alternating between saint and fury as the plot requires. Both actors are better than that, Thorne especially, who can make Sheila’s neediness frightening. Diane Farr’s Laura, the woman in the house, is handled with more care in the first season, when the crew’s hostility is shown for the small, tired thing it is, and then the show loses interest in her. The gags about gay men are meant to expose the men telling them, and sometimes they do. Sometimes they are just gags.
Then there is the cycle. Tommy drinks, stops, sees the dead, drinks again, wrecks a relationship, is forgiven. Season five runs to twenty-two episodes and the cycle turns perhaps four times in it. The later seasons take turns we will not describe, some of them bold and one or two of them cheap, and Adam Ferrara arrives as a new chief, Needles Nelson, and brings some air with him. By the end we were not angry, exactly. We were tired in the way you get tired of a friend who tells you the same story about himself at every party.
Most critics have been kinder than this, and we understand why: nothing else on American television in those years looked straight at what that day did to the people who went in, or dared to be funny about it. That is worth a great deal. Watch the first three seasons with someone who swears at the television, and see how far you get after that.
