--- title: "Rescue Me" year: 2004 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/rescue-me" fi1m_score: 77 critics_score: 81 critics_reviews: 5 published: "2026-09-17T00:12:26.081524+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T00:12:26.639762+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Rescue Me (2004) Created by Peter Tolan, Denis Leary · 1h 00m · MPA TV-MA · Drama **Fi1m score: 77** · Critics 81 (early) from 5 reviews *In a sentence:* The firehouse kitchen is the funniest room on television and every man sitting in it is quietly coming apart > 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. ## Synopsis New York, three years after the towers fell. Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) is a firefighter who drinks too much, has moved out of the family house and watches his wife Janet (Andrea Roth) and their children from a parked car. He also sees the dead: his cousin Jimmy, killed on 11 September 2001, turns up in his flat to offer advice, and Tommy keeps calling on Jimmy’s widow, Sheila Keefe (Callie Thorne). At the firehouse, Jerry Reilly (Jack McGee) runs things, Lou Shea (John Scurti) writes bad poetry, Franco Rivera (Daniel Sunjata) chases women, and the probie Mike Silletti (Mike Lombardi) takes the abuse. Laura Miles (Diane Farr) is assigned to the house, and nobody is pleased. ## Review *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. *Fi1m score 77, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (5) - **The Guardian** (90/100, inferred): This unflinching, darkly funny tale of fires and firefighters is one of the most underrated shows in recent years. Its subject matter is the problems of readjusting to everyday life as a New York firefighter after the devastation of 9/11. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/feb/06/rescue-me-box-set-review) - **The Hollywood Reporter** (80/100, inferred): The critic deems the series still a compelling drama full of strong writing and skillful acting after a hiatus, with its mix of redemption and ruin setting it apart. It singles out the ensemble work, especially John Scurti as Lou, for balancing comedy and pathos. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/rescue-tv-review-93030/) - **The Times**, Fiona Morrow (80/100, inferred): The critic praises the series as a searing, warts-and-all drama about New York firefighters that avoids sentimentality in favor of black humour tackling homophobia, misogyny, alcoholism and PTSD. It highlights the personal struggles of lead character Tommy Gavin, played by co-creator Denis Leary, as a realistic post-9/11 portrait. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/in-the-heat-of-the-moment-89vhvszkj3d) - **Variety**, Phil Gallo (80/100, inferred): The review calls it a smartly drawn, non-PC drama with a heavy comedic element that is a treat for Leary fans and fits FX's edgy slate. It singles out the taut direction (including from John Fortenberry) and the complexity of the characters for making the show believable. [Read](https://variety.com/2004/film/awards/rescue-me-3-1200532125/) - **Empire**, Steve O'Hagen (75/100, inferred): The critic finds the series a good example of American TV with fast pace, vibrant camerawork, lurid characters and full-throttle dialogue. It is pitched around post-9/11 soul-searching but benefits from frequent action sequences that punctuate the drama. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/rescue-season-1-review/) ## Details - **Created by:** Peter Tolan, Denis Leary - **Creator:** Peter Tolan, Denis Leary - **Director:** John Fortenberry, Jace Alexander, Peter Tolan, Ken Girotti, Rosemary Rodriguez, Constantine Makris, Adam Bernstein, Jefery Levy, Don Scardino, Peter Markle - **Writer:** Peter Tolan, Denis Leary, Salvatore Stabile, Robert Krausz, Stephen Belber, Michael Caleo - **Story:** John Scurti - **Teleplay:** Peter Tolan, Denis Leary - **Music:** Christopher Tyng - **Producer:** Denis Leary, Peter Tolan - **Cast:** Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin; Adam Ferrara as Chief 'Needles' Nelson; Andrea Roth as Janet Gavin; Jack McGee as Jerry Reilly; John Scurti as Kenneth 'Lou' Shea; Daniel Sunjata as Franco Rivera; Tatum O'Neal as Maggie Gavin; Mike Lombardi as Mike Silletti - **Runtime:** 1h 00m - **Certificate (MPA):** TV-MA - **Release (the US):** 21 July 2004 - **Genres:** Drama - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_ZJIaAO1Q ## Where to watch in the US - Hulu: streaming, hd - Netflix: streaming - Disney+: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy, sd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AE, AR, AT, AU, AZ, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HK, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IN, IS, IT, JP, KR, LT, MX, MY, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PH, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SG, SI, SK, TH, TR, UA, US, VN, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *The Shield* (2002): The other great FX drama of the period, and its lead is even harder to forgive - *Cracker* (1993), Fi1m 85: Robbie Coltrane’s psychologist drinks, gambles and lies, and is still cleverer than everyone around him — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/cracker.md) - *London's Burning* (1988): A Blue Watch firehouse on the Thames, gentler, and just as fond of its kitchen - *Six Feet Under* (2001), Fi1m 86: A family that lives with the dead every day and jokes about it to cope — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/six-feet-under.md) - *Spiral* (2005): Paris police and lawyers, coarse and quick, with no interest in making anyone likeable --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/rescue-me