Television: All Fired Up

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Tommy is a lot like Leary's previous TV character, a self-destructive Irish-American cop on the ABC sitcom The Job. That show debuted in spring 2001 and then ran smack into the aftermath of 9/11, when TV executives were not exactly eager to air unsentimental treatments of public servants. But FX is a different network, a cable channel trying to distinguish itself with controversial series like The Shield and Nip/Tuck. And it's a different time: now New York City fire fighters have been making the news for infractions that involve drinking and drugs and for suffering budget cuts.

Rescue Me may sound disrespectful on paper, but really it's the opposite; it respects the characters enough not to patronize them or soft-pedal their sarcasm, flaws and political incorrectness. At the firehouse, for instance, well-meaning bureaucrats have installed a fire alarm with the automated voice of a woman. "That voice," Lou says with a sneer, "is the closest thing I'm ever gonna come to working with a broad." When the house gets assigned a rookie named Mike, the veterans complain that there are already too many Mikes in the department--Mike the Mick, Guinea Mike, Mike the Wop and so on.

According to Terry Quinn, an F.D.N.Y. veteran and a friend of Leary's who serves as a consultant on the show, the bigoted ball busting is part of a firehouse culture in which guys constantly probe one another's weak spots, something TV's lionization of fire fighters tends to overlook. "Shows like Third Watch are corny, formulaic soap operas," Quinn says. The Rescue Me team is conscious of being more real, more unsparing, morewellcable. Looking over posters for the ad campaign backstage, Leary rejects one that has the main characters in uniform, lined up, gazing upward. "Too heroic," he says. "That looks like a CBS show."

The fire scenes too are unlike anything you've seen on TV or in the movie Backdraft: there are no fireballs--in fact, few flames at all--just a lot of smoke and confusion. That, Quinn says, is closer to fire fighters' real experience--navigating by sound, disoriented and sometimes encountering bizarre scenes, as when Tommy breaks through a door and is jumped by a naked junkie with a baseball bat who thinks he's after money. Quinn says the scene was taken from real life, as was a call Tommy's squadron gets to an apartment building where a tenant has poured dozens of jars of his urine down the stairs.