Rescue Me
It takes a special kind of courage to run into a burning building.
Every instinct we have tells us to run away from the smoke and heat and fire. But firemen ignore these impulses and dive into the inferno anyway, putting their lives at risk to rescue others. Many people consider firefighters true heroes, and with good reason.
But heroes or not, firefighters are real people, too, with real problems. And sometimes they're the ones who need to be rescued.
I'd imagine the producers of Rescue Me had something like this in mind when they created this FX program. The show revolves around the exploits—good and bad—of Tommy Gavin, a New York City firefighter with crimson hair, a combustible temper and a blazing addiction to alcohol.
The show offers up a deeply flawed antihero and occasionally gives viewers some smoldering issues to ponder. But for the most part, Rescue Me is a flaming building of flaws we should be wary of entering.
Where There's Smoke ...
As a firefighter who lived through the horror of 9/11, Tommy is consumed by survivor's guilt and is literally haunted by his past: Dead friends, relatives and even fire victims Tommy couldn't save visit him when he drinks, often simply to belittle or mock him. In one episode, he gets into a shoot out with the apparition of his long-lost son—a hallucination apparently brought on by Tommy's guilt over never knowing the boy.
But Tommy's not the only wounded figure on the show. Virtually all the characters in Rescue Me—from Tommy's fellow firefighters to his very own brood—are in need of redemption.
For example, when Tommy and his ex-wife, Janet, spend a weekend at their 12-year-old daughter Katie's preppy boarding school, they learn that she has fabricated a whole new life for herself there. It comes complete with practically made-up parents: Tommy, in Katie's fantasy, is a hedge fund manager. Janet is a fashion designer. They own posh getaways in trendy coastal resorts and love each other madly.
But when these lies inevitably unravel and a drunk Janet insults some of Katie's friends, the 12-year-old all but disowns her own parents. "Maybe you are bad," she shouts at her mother. "Did you ever think of that?" Katie demands that they leave the school—and so they do.
Oh, did I mention that Rescue Me is also a comedy?
A Four-Alarm Fire
The show is the brainchild of surly comedian Denis Leary (who plays Tommy) and writer Peter Nolan (the pen behind Analyze This and America's Sweethearts). And when Rescue Me aims for the funny bone, it does so with all the dexterity of a machete-wielding baboon.
Take the case of Sean Garrity, a firefighter with kidney cancer. It's hard to make cancer funny, but Rescue Me tries, making much of Sean's inability to defecate and spinning jokes out of a trip to the emergency room that involved urinating blood. When Sean informs his mom over the phone that he has cancer, he begs her to stay with him during a surgical procedure. His mother balks, saying that New York is too far to travel.
"You live in New Jersey!" Sean gasps. "It's an hour away!"
And then there's Teddy, Tommy's uncle, who spends his days volunteering at a veteran's retirement home. Recently released from prison after gunning down a man, Teddy is floored when some of the residents beg him to kill them, too—a tragicomic moment meant to argue the merits of euthanasia.
Most of Rescue Me's jokes aren't nearly that sophisticated, though. Many revolve around sex, masturbation and the male anatomy. Much is made of how good Dwight, Janet's wheelchair-bound boyfriend (played by Michael J. Fox) is in bed. When Tommy admits to Dwight that he had sex with Janet recently, Dwight grabs and squeezes Tommy's crotch for a television eternity.
"Seven minutes of pleasure, seven minutes of pain," Dwight says to a doubled-over Tommy.
And really, that just scratches the surface. We witness noisy, graphic depictions of sex (though without explicit nudity) as well as several affairs. Most of the "jokes" are too lewd to print, as is much of the show's language. Characters regularly utter all but the harshest profanities (the s-word is a favorite) and abuse both Jesus' and God's name, often pairing the latter with "d--n." The violence and gore can be extreme as well: Tommy's shoot out with his specter-son involves plenty of blood spatter.
When Leary was asked by the folks at givememyremote.com whether the network's censors have ever asked him to ratchet the content down a notch or two, he replied, "No, FX is absolutely the best group of people I have ever worked with. All they do is ask us to push the envelope even further."
A Total Loss
In addition to all that, there are also Tommy's issues with alcohol—no laughing matter, even in this show. Though Tommy apparently joined Alcoholics Anonymous last season, stayed sober for a year and even sponsored another alcoholic firefighter, he punts sobriety with a flourish in the most recent season, frequently boozing it up with the encouragement of a cadre of enablers.
The point? We're supposed to understand that the firefighter's addiction to booze could well destroy his life. Again.
And that's the thing about Rescue Me.
We, the audience, understand that Tommy is in dire need of rescue. We root for him to put down the bottle, extinguish his inflammatory behavior and maybe even patch things up with his wife. But Rescue Me probably won't ever give us that satisfaction. Because if Tommy did clean up his act for good, the show would be over.
Are Tommy's ongoing struggles with alcohol true to life? Well, in a sense, they are. Those with addiction issues do face a lifelong fight to stay away from booze or drugs or porn or what have you. That harsh reality is pretty obvious in Tommy's case.
Still, the unstated, perhaps unintentional message Rescue Me ultimately delivers is that redemption is only temporary, salvation only fleeting. In the end, Tommy seems doomed to drink and fight with his family and struggle with his ghosts as long as the show trundles on.
For him, there is no rescue.
Episodes Reviewed: May 19, 26, June 2, 2009