When the firefighters of New York’s company 62 dare each other to quit smoking, the allusions and metaphors strike dangerously close to cliché. Only a superbly imagined drama could pull off the inevitable moment when an exhausted firefighter stops battling an inferno to sneak a drag, lighting up off the burning building.
Where there’s smoke there’s “Rescue Me,” returning Tuesday at 11 p.m. on FX. Like everything on this show, the cigarette moment stops just short of being too cute, too clever.
It simply observes a truism: Tough to say which is the firefighters’ bigger addiction, tobacco or flames.
Even when it is heart-rending, as at the end of last season, “Rescue Me” remains the funniest tragedy on television. Also the most topical.
As it delves deeper and deeper into the lives of working-class 9/11 trauma survivors, “Rescue Me” offers an array of artfully drawn character studies.
Alone among TV entertainments, “Rescue Me” never lets us forget the personal toll of 9/11.
In the first season, Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) and his foul-mouthed crew absorbed the deaths of colleagues in the World Trade Center attacks.
By Season 2, what was left of family and marriages was a blaze of dysfunction. The men’s status as heroes was revealed to be double-edged. At the end of last season, another calamity befell our flawed hero: Tommy’s son was killed by a drunken driver. Tommy’s wife, Janet (Andrea Roth), from whom he is separated, blames him for not adequately supervising the boy.
As Season 3 begins, the tortured relationships seem beyond hope. Routines resume, along with the survivors’ hallucinations of fallen comrades. A carefully composed shot of Tommy, a new member of AA, viewed through a freezer confronting a bottle of vodka, sets the stage for the downward spiral that marks the first few episodes.
And yet there are more achingly funny moments than ever. If the raunchy humor is not about sex, it’s about food. Or aging or money, and back to sex.
The suffering continues as families splinter, old and new addictions beckon and the dead turn up without warning to berate the living for their lapses.
Never letting the rage-filled characters escape the memories of Sept. 11, 2001, the FX hour is brilliantly current. Leary, as a self-destructive fireman/family man/ladies’ man, is a marvel.
The show continues to draw hot guest stars: This season Franco (Daniel Sunjata) is singled out for an affair with “an older woman,” played by Susan Sarandon for three episodes. Marisa Tomei plays a hot Italian, Tommy’s brother’s ex-wife.
In his collaboration with Peter Tolan, Leary has created a world that is sadly credible and characters who are hauntingly soulful. Judging by the first three episodes of this season, Leary’s natural talent for humor is allowed to run freer.
“Rescue Me” can be as full of existential searching as “Six Feet Under,” as literary as “Deadwood” and as foulmouthed in its displays of Neanderthal machismo as “The Sopranos.” But it is never showy in these trips through the culture. Rather than quote Kant or, like “Lost,” layer the script with references to Locke and Rousseau, the characters of “Rescue Me” are street smart.
In fact, you get the feeling the writers are poking fun at the overintellectualized aspects of the smartypants competition. A violent feud between brothers is described by a firefighter onlooker as “Shakespearean, Scorsese-esque,” no doubt mocking those who would deconstruct, as well.
Perhaps to underscore the point, Michael the Probie (Michael Lombardi) is reading (and mispronouncing) The Tao of Pooh. Soon he’ll get to the part about “To know the Way, We go the Way.” That’s about as intellectual as it gets. The firefighters, like America itself, have lost their ways and are using various means – booze, babes, pills – to find themselves. Of course, Michael is teased for his reading choice. But he defends the famous bear of little brain. If only everyone could be more like that bear.
As the book says, “Pooh just is.”
You just know that if he gets hold of it, Tommy will have some less savory, probably unprintable, nicknames for Pooh.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
