EMOTIONAL RESCUE.(Television Program Review)

It seems incredible now that there was ever a time when you might have walked by a firehouse in New York City and not thought about the lives of the people who worked inside, even if your lack of attention was in some ways a form of respect, an acknowledgment that mere curiosity wasn't a good enough justification for looking too closely, for intruding on the privacy of people who lived with death, and faced death, every day. That privacy was blown apart on September 11, 2001, and it is not likely ever to be restored completely, although we started to hear, just a few weeks after three hundred and forty-three firefighters had died at the World Trade Center, and while hundreds of others were still recovering body parts from Ground Zero, that most of the men wanted only to return to their routines, to cook for themselves again instead of eating meals provided by grateful New Yorkers, and to stop bearing the burden of being treated as heroes every waking minute of their lives. Thousands of stories have been written about firefighters since that day, but to a great extent the thick red wall that separates these men from the rest of us remains, as it always will; unless you are a member of this family, you can never know all its secrets.

The television shows set in New York that were on the air at the time found a way to "deal" with September 11th, by threading in new story lines or by adding a special episode or, in cases where a show's fictional universe had no room for something so real, by including visual indicators (Joey on "Friends" wearing an F.D.N.Y. T-shirt), but Denis Leary and Peter Tolan's new FX drama, "Rescue Me," which starts Wednesday, July 21st, is the first new series to rise out of the ashes of that day. (TNT's limited series "The Grid," which also starts this week, has similar roots--Dylan McDermott plays an F.B.I. agent whose best friend died in the World Trade Center--but its focus is Islamic fundamentalism and the new world disorder. Despite wooden performances from McDermott and Julianna Margulies, as a counterterrorism expert, "The Grid" is involving and impressively complex.) "Rescue Me" is a daring, unflinching show--a worthy companion to FX's dark-hearted police drama "The Shield"--and it is unafraid to expose the not always pretty particulars of firehouse culture and the more fallible side of those we count on to save us.

Leary's persona as a comedian is that of a pissed-off, profane, politically incorrect ordinary guy, which serves him well in roles that call for him to react visibly and volubly to stressful situations, such as the smart-mouthed, substance-abusing cop he played in his and Tolan's short-lived 2001 series, "The Job" (in one episode, he was forced to take anger-management classes, at the same time that he was trying to quit smoking and drinking). In "Rescue Me," Leary plays Tommy Gavin, a fireman who's congenitally spoiling for a fight; in the pilot, he announces that if a shrink comes to his firehouse to try to get the men to talk about their feelings, "I'm gonna kick his ass," and he tells a group of new academy graduates that "my balls are bigger than two of your heads duct-taped together." But his blustering doesn't fool his demons. He knew sixty men who died on September 11th, including four from his own house, one of whom, Jimmy Keefe, was his cousin and best friend. As seems to be happening more and more on TV shows anytime a character thinks about a dead loved one, the ghost of Jimmy (James McCaffrey) has a way of showing up, in Tommy's car, or in his house, whenever he needs a talking to, such as the day he starts swigging whiskey again after fourteen months on the wagon. (Miller beer is a major sponsor of "Rescue Me," and underwrote the series' commercial-free premiere, which explains why Jimmy's drink of choice is Miller Lite, and why, in the third episode, Tommy and his chief pop open a couple of Miller Genuine Drafts. That's creative advertising, or something: having a character with a drinking problem promote ...