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The fifth season starts this Tuesday on FX, 10 eastern.
In Canada Sunday April 19 on Showcase, 10 eastern.
Rescue Me Music Rescue Me Videos
While it was a chore to get through season four, Michael J.Fox guest starring for five episodes as Janet's paraplegic boyfriend has me interested as well as the storylines they have for the next 22 weeks.
In Canada Sunday April 19 on Showcase, 10 eastern.
Rescue Me Music Rescue Me Videos
While it was a chore to get through season four, Michael J.Fox guest starring for five episodes as Janet's paraplegic boyfriend has me interested as well as the storylines they have for the next 22 weeks.
Fifth Alarm for That Haunted Fireman
By MARK HARRIS
Published: April 2, 2009
SOMEWHERE in the five boroughs of New York City there may be a less appealing view, but this one is certainly a contender for the prize: the vantage point from the profoundly unscenic Roosevelt Island Bridge, on a dank and blustery March night, as you look straight down into the frigid East River.
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Robert Presutti for The New York Times
Its no place anyone in his right mind would want to be. So its appropriate that this is where the crew of Rescue Me finds itself five days before the end of production on the coming season. The show has always specialized in watching the alcoholic firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), its not-entirely-sane protagonist, stare well, really smirk into the abyss. And here he goes again, during a scene in which three members of the crew of Ladder 62 try to talk down a jumper who has lost all his money in a Ponzi scheme.
Using the Madoff scandal as a throwaway joke in a scene that, like much of the series, could tilt toward black humor or tragedy, in this case literally depending on which way the wind blows, is fairly standard for Rescue Me. The shows lean three-man writing staff Mr. Leary, Peter Tolan (who created the show with Mr. Leary) and Evan Reilly rarely writes more than two shows ahead of what is being shot. The writers like the freedom to run with whatever captures their interest and abandon what doesnt. The days news, an actors on-set riff or an anecdote Mr. Leary hears from one of the two real-life firefighters on whom his character is based all are grist for their scripts.
This season, however, theyre making a major exception, with a long-term commitment to a story line that returns the series to its painful origins. In Season 5 of Rescue Me, which begins Tuesday on FX, the specter of 9/11 becomes a major character once again, when a French journalist starts interviewing firefighters about their experiences for a commemorative book.
Tommy, his co-workers in the firehouse and his on-again-off-again lover Sheila (Callie Thorne), a 9/11 widow who was married to Tommys firefighter cousin, must confront their feelings about something theyve spent much of the shows history trying to forget. Wounds that appear healed turn out to be raw; tempers flare over the commodification of a tragedy as a coffee-table book; the already fragile stability of several characters is threatened. And the plot unfolds with the shows signature mixture of bleak comedy, scatological raunch, rage, booze and Catholic guilt a blend of toughness and sentimentality that keeps Rescue Me very much Mr. Learys baby.
As far as Mr. Leary was concerned, the 9/11 plotline was inevitable. If it haunts him, its going to haunt his alter ego. Mr. Leary, 51, who is also a producer of the show, isnt Tommy Gavin, but the resemblance is no accident: both men are Irish-Americans, lapsed Catholics, sometime hockey players and prone to hyperverbal explosions of caustic wit. More to the point, Mr. Leary, like Tommy, had a cousin who died while fighting a fire not on Sept. 11, 2001, but in December 1999 in Worcester, Mass.
My cousins memorial is going to be this fall, Mr. Leary said in an interview on the set, and thats a big claw right behind the backs of my family and of a lot of firefighters up in Massachusetts. None of us want to admit it, but we all know its coming, and were all screwed up about it.
So it made sense to Mr. Leary to remind viewers that Tommy has never escaped that day. The big story that were telling, and hopefully the thing that makes the show work for people, is: How do brave men tick? he said. A lot of our story is about the fact that you have to keep running away from grief in order to sustain the bravery and insanity of what they do for a living.
Returning to the subject is a risky move at a risky moment. Ratings for Rescue Me through its first four seasons were remarkably steady, with the first telecast of each new episode drawing between 2.7 and 3 million viewers. But thanks to the writers strike of late 2007 and early 2008 the show has been off the air for 18 months, the kind of hiatus that almost always diminishes a shows audience.
FX has responded with several unusual votes of confidence: a supersize 22-episode order (a rarity for basic cable, where a season typically is never more than 13 episodes), a plan to run those shows over 22 straight weeks, a 10-city Rescue Me comedy tour headlined by Mr. Leary, and a commitment to a sixth season of 18 episodes, to begin in 2010.
Before that, however, the series may have to weather a year of controversy. This season one major character will become seriously ill with cancer apparently caused by his work at ground zero. Another, Franco Rivera (Daniel Sunjata), will articulate his Internet-fueled belief that 9/11 was an inside job, the result of a massive neoconservative government conspiracy that was designed to increase American power by creating a pretext for seizing control of the worlds oil supplies a view Mr. Sunjata himself happens to share. Early word of that plotline has already caused some lively News Corporation anti-synergy between FX and Fox News, where the commentator Greg Gutfeld furiously said it was tantamount to giving airtime to the crazy guy on the subway.
The reason we wrote it, Mr. Tolan said, is that Danny was spouting this stuff and even some of the guys, the firefighters on the set, were saying What is this? (They, of course, phrased it more strongly.) We saw how divisive this was and thought: We have to do this.
John Landgraf, the president of FX, said returning to the subject of 9/11 was true to the shows creative mission. As long as the show exists, it will periodically reconnect with where we are in processing it, he said, adding that the conspiracy-theory plotline represented only a small part of the seasons story.
Mr. Sunjata admits to some trepidation about how the shows audience will react to the story line. I wont say that my opinions were warmly received on the set, he said. At one point I thought, Maybe Ill get fired if I keep opening my mouth. But even though Peter and Denis didnt sign on to this conspiracy, they were brave enough to include it in the show. I give them and FX and Fox I never thought Id say this a big round of applause.
Mr. Sunjata certainly had reason to fear losing his job, since Rescue Me has never been timid about dispatching major characters. Aside from his cousin Tommy has weathered the death of his father, the murder of his brother, the hit-and-run killing of his young son and the suicide of the squads chief.
Job security may not be terribly high, but on the bright side dead doesnt necessarily mean gone, since most of the departed characters make post-mortem reappearances as ghosts that Tommy can never escape. At the end of Season 3, when Ms. Thornes volatile Sheila capped months of misadventure by trapping herself and a drugged Tommy in a fire she started, her fate was unclear.
They wouldnt tell me anything, Ms. Thorne said, laughing. Finally, I think to shut me up, Denis said, Look, if you come back as a ghost, your story line would probably be bigger.
Ms. Thornes character survived, but Mr. Leary confirms that Tommys roster of apparitions is soon to grow. Yeah, somebodys going to die, but its somebody that we will more than likely bring back as a vision next year, he said. Look, youre talking to the guy whos pitched FX three separate times on Tommy Gavin getting killed. It gets shot down, and I understand why, but how great would that be for the audience?
Mr. Landgraf confirmed the veto. The falling beam isnt going to land on him, he said. Tommy isnt condemned to die. Hes condemned to live.
Not that theres much of a difference on Rescue Me. One Christmas Mr. Leary and Mr. Tolan gave the crew coffee mugs marked Life. Love. Sex. Death, the four things Mr. Leary says the show is about. But on this windswept March evening its the coffee that seems like the most important element. As actors and crew members huddle on a makeshift platform on the bridge, Mr. Leary, in a Boston Celtics hoodie, ignites another Marlboro Light 100 and refines some of the dialogue.
Were not precious on this show, Mr. Tolan said, before walking up the bridge to direct the scene. Its never Youre going to say every comma. Were open to everything.
They do have an endgame in mind, though. At some point maybe at the end of Season 6, maybe later they will film Tommys last scene.
The real problem has always been in Tommys brain: If I fix all the stuff thats wrong with me, can I still go in that room where the fire is? Mr. Leary said. Thats ultimately where were going. That shot will have to answer everything that weve brought up about alcohol and bravery and cowardice and memory and grief.
When we figure that out, its going to be really interesting.
