TV: Rescue Me

I caught the commercial-free premiere of the Denis Leary comedy/drama Rescue Me on FX on Wednesday, and... I may have built it up a little too much in my head. It was very good, don't get me wrong, but I think I was expecting to be blown away on the level of The Shield's premiere, which is a near impossible standard to meet.

It opened with a great establishing scene, Denis Leary's Full Metal Jacket/Patton-esque speech to a group of NYFD cadets, with Leary setting the overall mood for the episode: a lot of tough talk masking a lot of pain just beneath the surface. We witness the pain almost immediately after Leary leaves the cadets: he gets a visit from his cousin, a firefighter who died at Ground Zero. "You know what they found of him?" he's just gotten through telling the cadets. "A finger. That's all. A finger." His cousin's appearance only externalizes Leary's haunted soul -- and it's well-played. It could've come off as very cheesy, but Leary's cousin -- and other "visitors" -- keep things interesting with the same rough humor and tough-talking bravado of the living firefighters. (In a later appearance, the cousin tries to pop open a beer can. "Dammit," he says, struggling with the task, "it had to be my beer-opening finger.")

Of the tough talk, we get a plethora throughout the show; the cursing pushes FX's already liberal standards, with plenty of racial epithets (wop, jewbag) and homophobic slurs thrown in to boot. The show doesn't shy away from portraying these firefighters in a less than flattering light; they don't take kindly to outsiders, or any variation from their narrow definition of acceptable behavior or appearance. A telling exchange comes late in the episode between Leary and a therapist sent to the fire station to offer counseling to those still reeling from Sept. 11. When she questions him on the lack of female firefighters in the station, he says he'd be fine with one on his team as long as she could do the job. But then he adds:

"You got a Martian, or a cyborg, or a Chinaman that can do the job, bring them on, too."
"Are there any Chinese firefighters?"
"Yeah, probably. Somewhere in... China."

That he would equate a "Chinaman" with inhuman creatures is no slip of the tongue. It's obvious anyone deviating from the norm is going to find some very rough going in this club. It's a bold and probably all-too-truthful way to present the NYFD. I'm assuming this is establishing a baseline mindset which will evolve as the series progresses -- but by small increments at best.

Leary's character is a heavy drinker and is getting divorced -- which isn't a far cry from his character in his previous series, The Job (which was cancelled way too soon), in which he played a pill-popping, philandering cop. The role isn't a stretch for him, and Leary doesn't have the acting skills to stretch much beyond the niche he's built for himself (he co-created both series), but that's fine, because it's an admirable niche. He takes public servants, for which he clearly has a great deal of respect (as evidenced by his charitable contributions), and humanizes them, shows them not only as heroes (a label they wouldn't want to apply to themselves, anyway), but as real and flawed human beings. And he does it with a great deal of dark, even mean, humor. (In Rescue Me, Leary terrifies his fellow firefighters by throwing a child-sized doll from a burning window.)

Where the show didn't hold up for me was in the actual firefighting. It's tough to stage a realistic fire on film, and I think they err on the side of caution here; the one fire the station responds to doesn't convey any of the excitement or danger we've been led to expect. It looks like what it is, a few small flames staged around the actors.

And the rest of the cast, with the exception of Leary's wife (played by Andrea Roth, whom I remember from last year's excellent comedy series Lucky -- which I'm still mad at FX for cancelling), are fairly indistinguishable so far, ranging from the gruff ladykiller to the gruff chief to the gruff... other guy who's gruff.

But these are small complaints. I enjoyed the first episode a lot, and I only expect the series to get better. It's a great addition to the FX library, which is rivalling HBO in great original series on a non-broadcast network. The big networks better watch their asses; by playing it too safe, they're giving viewers like me less and less reason to visit the single-digit channels at all.