Leary Is Trying to Do a Daring, First-Rate ‘Job’

The day before the debut of his new show, “The Job,” Denis Leary is either not too excited or making a point of appearing not too excited. Dressed in black jeans and a black sweater--and, in a rarity among performers, looking better in person than he does on screen--Leary exudes an air of been there, done that. Even though he actually hasn’t been here or done this before.

“I might be excited if we got back to work on it,” he says, filling his large, den-like office with cigarette smoke. “It’s show business. It’s out of your control. I think we [Leary and executive producer Peter Tolan] approached it like ‘Hey, we get to do six of these right now and let’s make them funny and true to the material.’ So that’s what we did. We figured there would be people who didn’t get it, and that’s fine. Television is tough. It’s tougher than the movies. You don’t even get an opening weekend.”

Leary cites as an example of this approach a conversation he had with “Seinfeld” producer-writer Larry David, who told him they were going to do the six shows that were commissioned the way they wanted and leave it at that. Of course, “Seinfeld” turned out to have a much longer run than six episodes, pulling in audiences with stories about nothing and a cast of losers.

Leary has similar ambitions. “The Job” is about a New York City cop, Mike McNeil, who smokes and drinks too much, pops pills and cheats on his wife. His colleagues have their own set of problems, though not writ as large or painted so boldly. Mike is modeled after a cop, Mike Charles, who served as a technical advisor to Leary when he played an officer in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Charles also serves as a technical advisor on “The Job,” though maybe not in the way he initially intended. Leary was inspired by his stories, yes, but he was really inspired by him.

“When I said to him, ‘I want to do a television show,’ he was rabid about it,” Leary says. “They get the technical stuff right, but they don’t get our personal lives. I think he thought I was going to focus more on the other people and the events. And of course I had glommed on to him as the central guy. I think he was a little shocked when he saw the first draft. But everything that happened in his personal life was known to all of the guys he worked with and then ultimately his wife and his girlfriend.”

Charles, incidentally, is still on the force, having cleaned up his act. What Leary is trying to capture, however, is not just the act but also the attitude and circumstances behind it, the cynicism, the need to lead a complicated private life to complement the on-the-job pressures--”adrenaline junkies,” Leary calls such cops. And this attitude neatly corresponds to the caustic persona Leary has developed over the years on stage in “No Cure for Cancer” and on the big screen in such films as “The Ref.”

“The persona that fits with Mike’s personality was something that I recognized would work for selling the show to ABC and then probably work for the audience,” he says. “And I figured people would say, ‘Oh, he’s just doing his own persona,’ when in fact I knew if they stick with it they’ll end up seeing that it’s not just that.”

It’s something of a miracle that ABC agrees, at least for now. The show is rife with “bad” language and toilet humor, easily surpassing the off-color antics of “NYPD Blue,” to which “The Job” has been compared. For example, the premise of one episode revolves around Leary being taken hostage in a men’s room as he desperately wants to use it. On another occasion one of his colleagues justifies an emotional outburst by saying she’s having her period. According to Leary and Tolan, all of this has driven ABC’s standards and practices guy nuts.

“He had memos trying to get us to trade” one dicey word for another, Leary says. “I would be on set or in the production office and Peter would say, ‘I’m going to make my call to the guy,’ and he would come back and say, ‘Here’s what he’s willing to do. . . .”

Leary thinks that they’ve been given leeway in part because ABC knew what they were getting with him and also because of Tolan’s reputation as a writer. Leary calls him a 4,000-pound gorilla. Dan McDermott, head of DreamWorks Television, which is producing the show, says he weighs in at 800.

“Somebody at the network called and said, ‘Does he have to have a girlfriend?’ And I said, ‘Yes he does,’ and that was it,” says Tolan, who worked on “Murphy Brown” and “The Larry Sanders Show” and has a string of feature films to his credit.

At first, Leary didn’t even bother approaching Tolan with “The Job” because he knew he was busy working on “Bedazzled” and other projects. However, Tolan got wind of the idea and offered to fly out from Los Angeles to meet Leary and Charles and write the pilot. And that’s exactly what he did, knocking out the script in a couple of days from Leary’s draft. They continued to collaborate bicoastally, though, when it came time to shoot, Leary insisted that it be done in New York City, in keeping with the material’s realism and the fact that he didn’t want to be away from his family. And he hates L.A.

“I can go about three days out there,” he says. “The industry thing is only one aspect of it--that combined with waking up and seeing the sun every day, I get sort of angry. It’s not fair to the people who decide to live there to walk around with that kind of anger when it’s a really nice day.”

New York also provides endless fodder for the show. A scene of the cops having to watch a videotape of an apartment building to discover who’s been dumping pork and beans on passers-by really happened. So did the episode involving a supermodel (played by Elizabeth Hurley), though in real life she was robbed rather than harassed. Leary hopes to work in a story line about a serial killer of the city’s pigeons, which required the police to conduct a standard investigation and pigeon autopsies.

“The more I thought about it,” Leary says, “the more I thought, ‘This is some good stuff.’ ”

* “The Job” airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-DLV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and violence).