Denis Leary isn't saying his lines precisely as written. Playing a domestic scene on a Long Island City soundstage with the actress cast as his ex-wife in FX's new drama "Rescue Me," Leary adds an extra word to his dialogue. First here. Then there. Then everywhere. He uses the word referring to the ex-wife's hated new boyfriend. He adds it as emphasis in addressing his fellow firefighter cousin.
It's not a word you can print in a mainstream newspaper. It's hardly polite language. But it's sure Denis Leary language, as evidenced in his caustic stand-up comedy rants, in its use as a song title in his "No Cure for Cancer" one-man show. And this salt-of-the-earth persona welcomes online users to his personal Web site with the same profane salutation. (See www.oringe.com/dl.) It's tough, raw, expressive, colorful and potentially offensive.
Welcome to Leary land. Welcome to "Rescue Me." Welcome to the New York City Fire Department. Under the skin of a profession Whether Leary's offhand dialogue survives into this episode's final cut remains to be seen, but it represents the rough-and-ready attitude he believes essential to a realistic depiction of life as an urban firefighter, especially in New York after 9/11. In the same way that Leary's offbeat 2001-02 half-hour, "The Job," captured the edginess, monotony, danger and absurdities of city detective work during its acclaimed but abbreviated ABC run - forget the cases, human behavior was the thing - Leary's new FX hour aims to get under the skin of a profession that attracts equally distinct personalities. (Its 13 episodes start Wednesday at 10 p.m. The premiere episode will air commercial-free.)
"It's territory that I've never seen growing up, and we've all seen a lot of cop shows and cop movies," the 45-year-old actor-writer-producer says of both the dramedy of "The Job" and his new take on firefighters. He remembers watching "Emergency" in the 1970s, when the Jack Webb-produced hour drew family audiences with its screaming sirens, firehouse horseplay and emphasis on "Dragnet"-style procedure.
"I don't think I've ever seen it done the way I know it happens," Leary says in his fusillade fashion, "which is funny, and dangerous, and scary, and a sense of family at the same time."
Leary already lives and breathes the firefighting scene. He has hung out with firemen for years, decades, going back to his hometown roots in Worcester, Mass. His cousin Jerry Lucey was among the six fighters killed in the savage 1999 Worcester warehouse fire, alongside Leary's childhood friend Tommy Spencer. That tragedy prompted the star to create the Leary Firefighters Foundation to raise money for survivors of firefighters killed in the line of duty, as well as for the equipment and training perpetually in short supply.
His resolve heightened after the events of Sept. 11 in New York, Leary's adopted home and the city where he has long hung out with friend Terry Quinn at West Harlem's Ladder 22. Leary's foundation then launched the separate Fund for New York's Bravest, each fund supported by annual charity bashes and other efforts claiming more than $3 million raised. (See www.learyfirefighters.org.)
But his personal interest became professional after ABC canceled "The Job." Leary finished a couple of movie commitments, then got working on a long-held notion that firefighters' lives are about the most inherently dramatic around. And he wasn't thinking in terms of high-speed runs and flaming action. He was thinking of the internal churning in the firefighters he knew. Adrenaline and danger "If your life is built on adrenaline and danger, you can't really do that unless you've got somehow control of your emotions, and the scores of deaths you might have witnessed, or the losses that you've been involved in," Leary says. He's sitting between takes at a table in the firehouse kitchen that's been constructed for "Rescue Me" in another part of Sony's soundstages at the foot of the Queensborough Bridge, the same studio where interiors for "The Job" were filmed.
"How does a guy deal with keeping his emotions at bay so he can still run into the building and save people, and yet grieve over the people, the relatives, the friends, the brothers, who were killed? It's a really interesting place to examine," Leary says, "especially for men" - and especially for men like firefighters who so doggedly camouflage any hint of vulnerability.
Tommy Gavin is in that place in "Rescue Me." Leary's character has become a veteran in the wake of 9/11, with so many of the department's senior fighters perishing with the World Trade Center in what Leary calls "the loss of the 343." As created by the writer-producer in Leary (his Apostle production company also made "The Job" in partnership with "Rescue Me" co-creator Peter Tolan), Tommy is much like the comic's stage persona - verbally assaultive, cynical, hardened, self-assured. But viewers see how haunted Tommy is by the losses he's seen. Ghostly images "Rescue Me" employs the dramatic device of ghost images that repeatedly materialize to shake him from an even keel. A girl who died after he saved her kitten. A boy whose seared skin peeled away. Tommy is battling the bottle again after 14 months of sobriety, and his exasperated wife has ejected him to a house across the street from her and their three kids. His closest confidant is, in fact, dead - cousin Jimmy Keefe (actor James McCaffrey), supposedly one of the 343 firefighters who perished and whose shadowy chatter challenges Tommy on every move he makes.
It's a tricky device, but one designed to get inside the head of the type of man who, as it's made clear in Wednesday's pilot episode, scoffs at "shrinks" and laying bare deep emotions. "These guys try to solve their own problems," Leary says. "They want to stay on the job. They want to keep at it. And you can only keep it tamped down for so long, because it has to come out somehow. So many marriages have broken up, families have fallen apart, because when somebody's young and sort of plucked off the planet, so to speak, the hole that's left behind is something you can't fill up. But it fills up with acrimony and finger- pointing, and human nature takes over."
Human nature as seen in "Rescue Me" is jocular yet pointed, spiced in the firehouse with casual ethnic slurs, sex talk and steam blown off in less than politically correct ways. It's all part of the visceral drive behind the firefighting life - its family heritage, both literal and figurative, the camaraderie it inspires, the pride it instills, the toll it takes.
"We're not trying to make a hero show," Leary stresses, amid a conversation in which he uses the word "heroes" repeatedly in referring to the real-life fighters he knows. "We're here to make a show about what it's really like to be a fireman."
Even from the brief video promo posted on the fxnetworks .com Web site, firefighters are already responding. The site's "Rescue Me" bulletin board is filled with postings from fighters who can't wait for the show to hit the air. They seem to know that Leary knows their world. Working-class roots "Denis and myself are from the working class," says Jim Serpico, Leary's Apostle production partner and an executive producer of both "The Job" and this new series. The East Meadow native and Plainview resident says: "I've had cops in my family, he's had cops and firemen. It's a world we relate to." So their shows are "not procedural like the network dramas. There's dark comedy, which these worlds lend themselves to. And it's not a lot of giant flames . It's the work, which isn't 95 percent putting out flames. It's all different kinds of calls - emergencies on the street, false alarms, subway calls," even a run in which responders must "shoot the rapids" as an enraged tenant pours urine down a building's stairwell.
Another selling point is that, when these firemen pull up to the curb, they're actually on a New York street. "We wanted New York City itself to be a character," Serpico says. "Everything about the show for us is about authenticity." They turned down another cable channel's series order, he says, because it was conditioned on shooting in less-expensive Canada.
They also cast actual former FDNY crewmen in key roles: Jack McGee (a 10-year veteran who plays the station's chief after appearing in "Backdraft" and "Turk 182") and Ed Sullivan (who retired in 2003 after 20 years, including responding on Sept. 11). Leary's pal Quinn, firefighter first grade after 15 years, is the series' technical adviser. FDNY crews are hired as extras, so even the background action conveys legitimacy.
Firefighters' respect for Leary is clear in the amiable abuse he earns from co-star McGee. "He's a pain in the --," barks the actor with his own hard-bitten persona. "He's sarcastic as hell. He'd like you to think he's a big, tough guy, but he's so full of --. He knows I see right through him. But he's passionate about the guys he knows as firemen."
But Leary isn't out for glorification. Just accurate depiction. "Like I said, we're not trying to make heroes with spotlights out of these guys. We're just trying to portray it as close to real as is possible. Because that's the human. That's the good story."
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