‘Rescue Me’ just can’t help itself

Strange that a series about New York City firefighters post-Sept. 11 would feel more convincing as a comedy than a drama, but that’s the mixed bag the cable network FX presents tonight at 10, with the debut of a new series, “Rescue Me,” starring Denis Leary.

Leary, the former stand-up comic of angry descent, railing against 1990s political correctness, is the soul of the series, its star, co-creator and co-head writer. That’s a lotta Leary.

In “Rescue Me” he puts bricks of post-Sept. 11 pathos on his back and doesn’t get very far. Tonally, “Rescue Me” is not unlike Leary’s last TV series, ABC’s “The Job,” in which he played a New York City detective. That show, co-created by Peter Tolan, who again collaborates with Leary here, was a well-paced, darkly comic half-hour ensemble piece; “Rescue Me” is an hour, and Leary can’t hold it.

He plays jaded firefighter Tommy Gavin, whose crew lost four men on Sept. 11, including Tommy’s best friend and cousin, Jimmy. Now the firefighters have gone back to their lives and their jobs and no one much cares that today they had to clear an apartment building of a river of urine. As one of Tommy’s comrades complains after a bad date: “All that [sex] I was getting after 9/11. Now, nothing. People forget.”

That indicates some of what Leary and Tolan are up to; they want to honor the men who rushed into the World Trade Center towers but also puncture some of the sanctimony now attached to the badge. This isn’t a bad idea, necessarily, to do a serialized story about the firefighters left behind, in a sense. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, network executives and movie studios got busy erasing images of the World Trade Center towers from their product, presumably because it would disturb us. In the years since, however, erasing has been replaced by forgetting -- and beyond forgetting, a return to the cartoon-violence-for-profit that Sept.11 temporarily halted.

So here comes “Rescue Me,” to remind us. Psychically, the show takes place in the years after the still-smoldering ache Bruce Springsteen sang about on his album “The Rising.” Leary’s character is a fine mess: He’s back on the bottle, he’s seeing ghosts (he has regular conversations with his dead cousin), and his estranged wife, feeling stifled by their neighborhood of firefighters, is threatening to move the kids away.

“You know what’s worse than all the guys that died that day?” she tells Tommy. “The rest of you left behind, walking around like everything’s fine. When you’re dead inside.”

That last line’s a little ouchy. Meanwhile, Leary isn’t an interesting enough actor to make us forget the show’s more earnest intentions. Jimmy, speaking from the grave, doesn’t so much haunt Tommy as act as a kind of therapist. “Any long-term relationship has the same underlying engine no matter what the sexual affiliation might be,” Jimmy tells him, after a firefighter comes out as gay in the New York Post.

Was it HBO’s “Six Feet Under” that jump-started this relationship talk by the dead? Or was it Dr. Phil? Regardless, all of the tumult in Tommy’s life adds up to a new setting for Leary boilerplate: the tough, sarcastic exterior masking the 101 ways he’s hurting inside and screwing up his life. Since moving away from stand-up comedy, Leary has been trying to graft depth onto the raging stage persona. There were movies like “The Ref” (yay) and “Two If by Sea” (boo).

Leary and Tolan would have been better off turning “Rescue Me” into the first post-Sept. 11 TV comedy about the world, post-Sept. 11.

They have the jokes in them, the skewed point of view, and Tolan, particularly, is the kind of pro who can balance our sympathies while revealing the foibles in people; he was an executive producer of arguably the best series ever about show business, “The Larry Sanders Show” on HBO.

To that end, there are some quietly comic moments in “Rescue Me.” A fire chief (Jack McGee) wipes the soot off the TV in a smoldering apartment to check the score of a football game he’s bet on. And when another member of the crew begins writing poetry to get his feelings out, the storyline gets turned inside-out when he shows the poetry to his wife.

It’s a wonderful, layered scene in a show that can’t quite sustain its nobler intentions. Off-stage, Leary has worked for the cause -- he started a charity, the Leary Firefighters Foundation -- and has raised money for the New York Fire Department. Clearly, he cares about firefighters and knows them, knows the cadence of their speech, what matters to them. But “Rescue Me” feels like a misguided gesture of goodwill -- one that serves Leary’s vanity in addition to his heart.

*

‘Rescue Me’

Where: FX

When: Premieres 10 p.m. tonight. Regular schedule: 10 p.m. Wednesdays, with repeats throughout the week.

Rating: TV-MA-LVS (may be unsuitable for children under 17, with advisories for language, violence and sexual activity).

Denis Leary...Tommy Gavin

Daniel Sunjata...Franco

Steven Pasquale...Sean Garrity

John Scurti...Kenny “Lou”

James McCaffrey...Jimmy Keefe

Written, directed and co-created by Peter Tolan. Tolan and Jim Serpico are executive producers.