Has anyone seen “Rescue Me”? We talked tv some time ago, and no one ever mentioned this — his show about firefighters. We caught an episode last night, and … it’s good. I had been a fan of his short-lived “The Job,” where he played the same character but as a cop, and that show too is often superb, ‘though pitched more directly as a comedy. “Rescue” seems (from one episode) to have a broader set of objectives, pushing dark comedy but also some of the bleaker portrayals of working-class men destroying themselves which Leary tackled in the film “Monument Ave” some time back.
I ordered it from Netflix, but I’m curious if others have any opinions.
I didn’t catch the first episode of the new season, but I watched the first season, and it really is good. On the surface this is just the familiar “being a cop is so tough that every cop has a fucked up personal life†story applied to NYC firefighters (a trap that even ‘The Wire’ falls into, but that is so good a show in so many other ways that it doesn’t matter). But in ‘Rescue Me’ it doesn’t excuse or glorify the way that Leary and the other characters mess up their own lives and the lives of everyone whose paths they cross. It manages to be poignant, and even to redeem individual characters, without buying into some post-9/11 heroism narrative. I was pretty astonished that from the first episode of the first series the show began to puncture, or at least question, the unimpeachable high moral standing of firefighters after 9/11.
But, as Mike points out, Leary is almost always good. ‘The Job’ was also a deeply subversive show gussied up as a sitcom (think ‘Sports Night’ with shorter sentences), and Leary single-handedly redeemed the ‘Thomas Crowne’ remake. He even made me like ‘Judgement Night’, thought I won’t try to defend that judgement here. The thing about Leary is that he just goes beyond the usual angry comic routine to real social commentary. He used to host some comedy fundraiser for a Boston hockey player (I never really understood what the charity was about so that may be wrong) that was repeated all the time on Comedy Central, and every comic was angry, white and working class. But only Leary had a point, so his gags fed into a wider comment on – and as usual Mike is spot on here – white working class culture, warts and all. Not that I need my TV to be “relevant” but it is nice when it is.
I’ve liked what I’ve seen of the show, but I think I’ve only watched one episode all the way through. It is simply the commercials that make it – and most TV drama – unwatchable to me, good acting or no.
But come on, I like Leary too (though I always preferred Bill Hicks as far as angry comedy goes), but let’s not start praising steaming piles of crap like the Thomas Crowne Affair. (“I hated having my leg amputated, but because Denis Leary was the one wielding the blade, that made it pretty darn ok.”)
I did however watch a rather amazing film last night and will post about it post-haste so that you can see that I am not 100% full of bile.
Fair enough. Maybe it was just Nina Simone on the soundtrack or 40+ year-old actors appearing to enjoy sex that gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling about ‘Thomas Crowne.’
It is an interesting — and important — question whether, had he lived much past the first Gulf War, Bill Hicks would have sold out to sitcoms and movies. Every time some Ohio legislator talks about teaching intelligent design in the schools, I think of Hicks’ line about the lack of opposable thumbs among the population of certain American states. And his line about wearing a rifle pendant in memory of JFK… ouch! That man really was a comic genius.
Bill Hicks took the easy way out by dying. He never had to sell-out, and he’ll aslways be funny. I am impressed by Leary managing to turn his angry comic persona into smart acting roles, like The Job and Rescue Me.
It’s obviously a difficult transition to make as evidenced by almost no one else being able to do it as well as he has. Leary could have ended up on the Sam Kinison road. (shudder).
there is a book of Hicks’ material out: letters, writings, maybe some stand-up transcripts… Not sure it’s worth buying, but I imagine his stuff would hold up in the printed word, even without his excellent delivery.
Check out Leary in “Final” — he plays a guy institutionalized, may be crazy, may have travelled in time. The whole movie is mostly Leary talking with Hope Davis, and it’s great. (And distant from the more typical angry-guy roles he gets.)
doesn’t leary play the lead, opposite sandra bullock, in something called “two if by sea” or something like that? i might have slept through it on a plane once.
I was checking out Bill Hicks and Dennis Leary material on Amazon (the book Mauer mentions above looks good), and I cam across this (harsh) comment from a reviewer:
“The insider joke amongst comics about this whole Denis Leary / Bill Hicks debate is that it’s funny that Denis Leary’s album is called “No Cure for Cancer”. If there were a cure for cancer, Bill Hicks would be alive and Denis Leary wouldn’t have a career.”
I missed this show the last couple of years (whenever it began) but have begun watching this season and think it to be high quality television: the writing, direction and acting as good as anything I’ve seen (without all of the macho-posturing I have come to expect from FX) in the last few years.
One of the co-creators/head-writers of Rescue Me–Peter Tolan–wrote and directed a decent little character-driven black comedy called Finding Amanda. Matthew Broderick plays a fucked-up screenwriter with a bad gambling habit (and a host of other addictions); he heads out to Vegas, ostensibly to rescue his niece, who’s started hooking. Brittany Snow, as the niece, gets some great, surprising scenes — in fact, the whole film moves to its own darker, surprisingly thoughtful rhythms, even as it keeps feeding Broderick scenarios to allow him to squirm and squeeze off smartassery. This ain’t great. There’s a crap soundtrack, overdetermining occasional cartoonishness in side characters. But the leads are both quite strong and, again, Tolan keeps sidestepping some obvious beats and resolutions. Worth a look, streaming on Netflix.