See those hands of yours? Good. Now clap ’em over the ears of any kid within a 2-mile radius of the TV if an installment of “Rescue Me” happens to pop up on the screen. Because the FX Network series that ended its seven-year, 93-episode run Wednesday, four days shy of the 10th anniversary of the event that prompted its creation and forged its crooked sensibility, is filled with naughty words and outrageous acts that are about as fitting for a tyke to encounter as a clutch of AK-47s in the toy box.
When the kid grows up, though, you can peel off the makeshift earmuffs and let “Rescue Me” loose at full blast. For anyone older than 18, this series ought to be required viewing and will remain so for decades. Of all the artistic responses to 9/11 and its aftermath — the finely wrought novels, the somber documentaries, the earnest plays and moody poems — nothing tops “Rescue Me.”
It’s funny. It’s foul. It’s insanely creative. It’s audaciously and excruciatingly human, which is to say it’s sometimes wonderful and sometimes dumb, and it takes stereotypes such as “hero” and “victim” and turns them inside out, like a pair of old socks you ought to wash before you wear again but don’t want to.
The fact that a series such as “Rescue Me” even exists, given the delicate, culture-wide sensitivity about 9/11, given the dome of political correctness that was dropped over the event within days, is its own little miracle.
Here’s the setup: Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) is a firefighter in a New York firehouse nicknamed 62 Truck. He’s haunted by the ghost of his cousin, Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey), who perished while on duty during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Tommy is a first-class, Grade A, head-of-the-class jerk, a self-pitying, unrepentant alcoholic bum who constantly trots out his grief and shock over 9/11 as an excuse for his ferociously selfish behavior.
As played by Leary, he’s also sexy and charismatic and irresistible, the bad boy to beat all bad boys, with his Peter Pan grin and his floppy yellow hair and his stovepipe legs and his tight T-shirts commemorating long-gone rock concerts or also-ran hockey teams, and his smoldering rage. You can’t forget the rage — because Tommy won’t let you. He’s rubbing your nose in it every few minutes or so, smearing you with it, making sure you understand just how much he’s suffering. (Ergo, you must suffer too.)
Leary is the linchpin of “Rescue Me,” not only because he co-created the series with Peter Tolan but because the character he plays to scruffy, obnoxious perfection is the heart and soul (and another important body part, which shall not be specified herein) of 62 Truck.
When the alarm sounds — when the firefighters have to dump temporarily their grudges and their fears and their resentments and their sexual peccadilloes, when they grab their gear and go — they are totally professional and focused. They do their jobs.
And that’s when it hits you. That’s what real-life firefighters and police officers and other public servants did on 9/11. They weren’t saints. They weren’t noble or golden. They wanted to live just as much as everybody else wants to live, and for the same reasons: to eat and drink and make love and laugh with friends and watch their kids grow up. But they did their job. Even with the knowledge that doing their jobs might well bring an end to all those things — they did it anyway.
Despite the copious subplots about romances and ghosts and alcoholism, despite the occasional ill-conceived forays into slapstick sexual farce, “Rescue Me” is about 9/11 all the time — but not in a typical way. Not because Tommy is constantly uncorking his platitudinous twaddle about it — “Normal is dead and buried beneath ground zero,” he says to his wife, by way of an argument-ending zinger in this season’s first episode, “and I’m just trying to make sense out of what’s left above ground.” The real 9/11 moments in “Rescue Me” occur when the alarm kicks in and Ladder 62 gets busy.
Firefighting isn’t what Tommy and his sloppy, querulous pals do; it’s who they are. They answer the call — whereupon the sloppiness vanishes and cool, radiant competence takes over.
Other standouts in the seven tumultuous, sex-saturated, booze-soaked seasons of “Rescue Me” include John Scurti as Lieutenant “Lou” Shea, Tommy’s best friend, a man who’d sell his soul for a red velvet cupcake and whose erotic misadventures are both hilarious and sad; Andrea Roth as Janet, Tommy’s feisty wife; and Daniel Sunjata as Franco Rivera, a handsome, arrogant, back-stabbing firefighter. The Evanston-born Sunjata plays the kind of colleague who makes you want to double-check the deadbolt on your locker.
And then there are the guest stars, the actors who showed up over the years and performed deftly, such as Tatum O’Neal, Maura Tierney and Michael J. Fox.
“This is just a piece of popular entertainment,” is what co-creator Tolan recently told the Los Angeles Times about the series, adding, “It’s not going to change the world.”
If you believe that Tolan believes that, then you probably also believe that William Faulkner was sincere when, asked about the significance of the title of his 1932 novel “Light in August,” he replied, “I just thought it sounded pretty.”
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Tolan, like Faulkner, seems to be allergic to the pretentiousness that can go along with creating “art,” and that’s fine. But we don’t have to buy his modesty. “Rescue Me” is going to change the world. In fact, it already has — just by existing, and just by insisting, week after raunchy week, dirty joke by dirty joke, bell after bell, that life goes on.
That life-goes-on business is the good news. It’s also the bad news. Each of us must learn how to handle the idea that both things can be true simultaneously — which, when you think about it, is probably what turned Tommy Gavin into a two-fisted drinker in the first place.