All Fired Up

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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.

Sometimes Rescue Me's humor and drama clash, as in the pilot, when the affecting penultimate scene — Tommy drinking alone at the beach, being joined by the specters of his cousin, other 9/11 casualties and two kids who died while Tommy was trying to save them — is undercut by a scatological punch line. But the nervous dance between the two is generally fitting for nervous times, when the warm consensus that followed 9/11 has faded but the anxiety has not. Rescue Me's firemen are processing mixed signals ("You're heroes! You're bums!"), much like the rest of us ("Duct tape your windows!" "Go out and shop!"). They — and the country — are on edge, the place where Leary has spent most of his career. "These guys deal with life and death every day," he says, finishing his lunch. "They walk past memorials [to 9/11 victims] every time they walk into the firehouse. They have to be able to laugh, or they'll fold in on themselves. It's a hell of a job. Hell of a job."

Then he heads back toward the set, pulls out another cigarette and fires up.