Burning Man: Denis Leary

If, as the saying goes, tragedy is when you fall down a manhole, comedy is when someone else does and drama is trying to find a way back out, then Rescue Me is one of the most well-rounded hours of entertainment on television.



Since its debut in 2004, the series about the personal and professional lives of fictional firefighters in post–9/11 New York has been mining a very rich, very gray area where emotional realism, morbid humor and absurdist theater converge.



The manhole in this case is a sixteen-month hiatus. Stalled after season four by last year’s writers’ strike, Rescue Me sat out 2008. But it returns April 7 with twenty-two episodes, upped from the usual thirteen. And even before the fifth-season debut, FX committed to a sixth season of eighteen episodes.



Clearly, execs are confident the audience will return.



Their ace in the hole is Denis Leary: creator, writer, executive producer and star. He plays the inimitable Tommy Gavin — a respected FDNY veteran who drinks, sees ghosts, emotionally abuses himself and his estranged family, impregnates his cousin’s 9/11 widow and otherwise falters everywhere but in the line of fire.



“I don’t know if there’s ever been a more flawed hero,” says FX president John Landgraf with obvious pride. “I believe that Tommy Gavin will go into the pantheon of the most iconic characters who’ve ever existed on television. It’s just the character in many ways that Denis was born to play.”



In a former warehouse in Long Island City, a bottle’s-throw from the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, the crew is lighting a scene in the bar owned by one of the firefighters and managed by his pals.



The storyline involves Gavin exploiting the alcoholics in his family, encouraging them to drink in the bar to lure hipsters in search of “authenticity.” Beats like this are standard Rescue Me fare, biting commentary on its larger world with a recognizably Leary tone.



Until Tatum O’Neal steps on set (introduced in season three as Gavin’s sister, Maggie), it’s hard to tell the hard-bitten cast from the hard-bitten crew and the hipster extras from the hipster production assistants. Further testament, perhaps, to the show’s verité.



Upstairs, most of the space is given over to fitness equipment and a makeshift music studio. Leary is lounging on a couch in a cramped inner office, watching ESPN and chain smoking. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his cousin Jerry — Jeremiah Lucey — became a fireman and died fighting a 1999 warehouse fire, and it’s clear just how much Rescue Me means to Leary personally by the way he mutes SportsCenter instead of just lowering the volume.



“From the beginning, we approached the show with four words: life, love, sex, death. Those were going to be our themes,” he says. “Real firemen work in this crazy world where all the ordinary rules kind of get thrown out the window. Death is the thing they accept the easiest, from the moment they get out of the academy. That mentality, I think, makes life, love and sex the really difficult part.”



Even easier, according to Leary, is his collaboration with Peter Tolan, the actor-writer-producer-director with whom he created the show. The pair shared a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2005 for their writing of the series pilot, and Tolan got a nod as director. In ’06 and ’07 Leary was nominated as outstanding lead actor. (Both have been nominated for other programs, including Leary in ’08 as supporting actor in the HBO movie Recount; Tolan has two wins as a writer, for Murphy Brown and The Larry Sanders Show.)



But the partnership is as much a mutual admiration society as a creative team. “He’s a master,” Leary says. “That’s actually what we call him: The Master.”



Tolan defers. “You know,” he says later by phone from Los Angeles, “I think I’m more of a comedic writer, and Denis — who’s obviously a very funny guy — actually handles the drama better.”



Rescue Me, and by extension Denis Leary, deserve high praise for this balancing act. The blend of drama and comedy is the show’s notable achievement. Tolan credits this to its star.



“Denis came to me and said, ‘Look, I’m going to play all sides of this guy. I’m going to play the damaged side of this guy.’ And that’s not just anger, and that’s not just the way he treats people — that’s real emotional distress. And Denis dove into that when the time called for it. He was no longer flirting with it. He was all the way in. That was pretty impressive, I’ve got to say.”



Leary shrugs off the praise. “I just wanted to make sure that if we did a fire show, we would have the freedom to do dark drama and twist on a dime into black humor. That’s the firehouse armor, the defense mechanism that my cousin’s crew had and that firemen I know have. Coming back from a job, busting each other’s balls, then getting over the job and forgetting about it. So I knew the show had to have all those elements.”



The blessing of the network president has made it much easier for Leary and Tolan to explore those extremes. Having his admiration has been even better for business. “I think Denis Leary is a great dramatic actor,” Landgraf says. “Not a good dramatic actor. A great dramatic actor.”



The arrangement has been good for Leary as well, who lives in Connecticut with his wife Ann, a novelist, and their two teenagers. “FX was adamantly in our corner about shooting in New York. And the only thing we lost by not going to HBO or Showtime was the ability to say the word f—k. And I thought that was a good challenge to have, to make the audience think they were hearing that word, but they never were.”



Leary’s popularity has been at a respectable simmer ever since his “Kiss my royal Irish ass” routines on the stand-up circuit in the 1980s. He distilled his Boston-brogued, ball-busting rants into two albums, No Cure for Cancer (1993) and Lock and Load (1997), racked up roles in a modest range of features and scored commercial success without overexposure as the voice of Diego, the saber-toothed tiger in the animated Ice Age franchise.



His first TV series, The Job, was canceled after two seasons on ABC, but Gavin seems to have ignited as an ideal alter ego.



“What you see,” Landgraf says after a considered pause, “is the anger in Denis Leary channeled through Tommy Gavin that led him to be a comedian in the first place — or the fear or the grief or whatever it is.”



Leary finds a certain irony in this. “I started out as an actor,” he says, “and I became a comedian because I couldn’t get any stage time. Then I had to convince people that I was an actor.” Now that he’s had recognition as a writer, he’d prefer to keep moving farther behind the camera.



“That’s where I’m going. Definitely. Writing is my favorite part of it. Directing would be my second favorite part. Acting, it’s just a pain in the ass.”



Rescue Me is far from a one-man show. With a talented supporting cast — including Adam Ferrara, Michael Lombardi, Steven Pasquale, Andrea Roth, John Scurti, Daniel Sunjata and Callie Thorne — Leary, Tolan and fellow writer Evan Reilly find the bar is always set high.



“We know which actors are the best at improvising,” Leary says, “so we give them the freedom. Most of the time they just come in and tell us how they’re going to do it, so we don’t really look at it as freedom.”



All this alchemy has amounted to a winning formula by any measure. Five million weekly viewers watched its last season, critical kudos have been consistent and there are those Primetime Emmy nominations for writing, directing and acting. To coincide with the April premiere, FX is unrolling a major marketing campaign that includes a month-long, eleven-city comedy tour with Leary and other cast members.



Overcoming the impact of the strike has been a prime consideration for the network. “The upside,” Landgraf says, “is that we’ve got twenty-two episodes in a row, which is a great treat for the fans. The downside is that when something’s off the air for sixteen months, there’s always a worry that people will forget about it.”



To whet audience appetites in the interim, FX produced ten five-minute minisodes that aired last summer and are still available online. Also, Michael J. Fox has signed on for a multi-episode role to generate a new character (the boyfriend of Gavin’s ex-wife) and new interest.



“We’ve never had a show that’s been so consistent in the ratings, year in and year out,” Landgraf says. “It’s got a really strong core audience. And, surprisingly, it’s got equal female viewership.”



Despite having been named one of People’s sexiest men in 2005, Leary won’t take the credit for the strong female demo. “We were surprised at how many women had registered as viewers of the show,” he admits, “and the fact that they stuck with it.” He floats his theory that Rescue Me is a male, blue-collar version of Sex & The City. “They see it as a window into how those types of guys think and behave. And that’s always been one of the reasons that I wanted to write it.”



The temptation to blur the line between Gavin and Leary is a natural one. Leary has been steeped in the family culture of firefighters. His Leary Firefighters Foundation, set up to honor his cousin and fallen comrades, keeps him active in that culture, and his newest book, Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid (Viking, 2008), could have been written by Gavin. Chapters like “Nuns, Tits, Booze and My Mom” and “Autism Shmautism” propelled him onto the New York Times bestseller list and an Oprah appearance to tamp down what had become an autism-shmautism donnybrook.



In reality, Leary is a devoted family man, a well socialized if sports-obsessed human being and a genetically wired comedian. His character is diametrically opposed to Gavin’s, but he can’t help but identify with him intimately.



“Things that happen during a fire — like a child’s lips coming off on Tommy’s lips when he’s giving him mouth-to-mouth — stuff like that really happened to friends of mine,” he says. “And some of the comedy. But, really, just the behavior. Tommy keeps all these horrible things at bay. They all fall away because he’s got to keep going. If he stops too long, he would just implode. I know a lot of guys like that.”



For moving drama and absurd comedy — too often referred to by the frivolous-sounding word “entertainment” — the show has been an unqualified success. But it goes a step further. It tackles a delicate subject and serious issues without flinching.



“One of the proudest moments this network’s ever had,” says Landgraf, “was when the New York Times ran an editorial shortly after the series premiered and basically called Rescue Me Me the best, most important piece of storytelling that’s been made to contextualize the 9/11 tragedy.”



When asked about the ultimate “importance” of his television show, Leary responds philosophically. He takes a final drag and drops his cigarette in a cup of cold coffee. “I remember my cousin used to say, ‘You don’t do it for the money. You do it because you belong there — and you think you can make a difference.’” Then he turns back to SportsCenter and curses the Boston Bruins goalie.



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As published in Emmy Magazine Issue No. 2, 2009