TV review: Rise of the warts-and-all hero

It's a pity that TV One has demoted the latest series of Rescue Me, Monday nights, to the post-11pm zone, because it's the only soap-drama likely to appeal to men.

Since The Sopranos, there's been nothing that takes men seriously in all their warts-and-all glory.

Rescue Me, though many women find it trying, at least does blokes the service of allowing that they can be heroes and neanderthals at the same time.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Rescue Me - though at the same time the most off-putting - is that the hero is not particularly likeable. Leastways, not to your average woman.

Denis Leary's fireman Tommy is a weak, vain, self-pitying, two-timing, lying, constantly relapsing alcoholic with a disastrous private life.

Though he is capable of great heroism on the job, and can sometimes be a standup guy off-duty, by and large he is a train wreck.

Actually, pretty much everyone on this show is a train wreck. It's like an update on the superb old tusker NYPD Blue - only with less-evolved characters all the way through.

NYPD Blue had to rely on the criminals to do the really scummy things. In Rescue Me, there are no designated bad guys, because fire is the enemy, so it's up to the men in uniform, and their girlfriends and sundry rellies, to commit the atrocities that keep a soap drama humming.

What might keep even a tut- tutting woman viewer coming back is that this show is so damned eventful.

You're lucky if there's any fire at all in an episode, because these firemen are so flat out with other dramas: murdering people, stalking people, pretending not to be gay, victimising people who are gay, getting on the wrong side of drug lords and being murdered, being fleeced by prostitutes, going to AA, drinking again, going back to AA, taking drugs, getting clean, taking more drugs, having affairs with one another's wives, and even raping one another's wives.

At the end of last series, Tommy had reneged on a decision to retire from the New York fire service, and rekindle things with his ex, Sheila.

This was because his other ex, Janet, was pregnant, and despite the fact that she had had an affair with Tommy's now dead brother Johnny - who originally raped her, but apparently she liked it (yes, this was somewhat controversial) - and the baby might be his, Tommy had decided to recommit to Janet and the upcoming sprog.

Understandably peeved at this, Sheila had somewhat overreacted by drugging Tommy, but then she accidentally set fire to their house, leaving us a cliffhanger - would either of them survive?

Not much of a cliffhanger as, if Tommy perished, there would be no more Rescue Me.

Sure enough, last week the pair of them emerged unscathed - but with a tricky bit of explaining to do about the small matter of arson.

Tommy can't remember a thing. Sheila, who's about as cuddly as Cruella de Vil, is now insisting that Tommy cooperate with her in a version of events that will net them $2 million in insurance. Her version of events is that Tommy had got himself roaring drunk that night, tried to seduce her, failed on account of er, equipment malfunction, and flew into a rage, causing a gas pipe to be ruptured.

Knowing Tommy's prehistoric mind as we do, we can see that he is so fixated by the horror of having been impotent, he is shocked and cowed into going along with the story.

Meanwhile, his daughter has run off with a rock singer, his uncle has been freed after murdering the drunk driver who killed Tommy's young son, his workmate is about to be kicked off the brigade for failing his physical, and his dead brother keeps turning up in increasingly realistic visions.

Is there a drama series now on TV where dead people don't routinely pop up and take part in events?

And that's without going into the subplots of the minor characters: the odd assisted suicide, illicit affairs, faked alcoholism and postnatal depression.

The trouble with trying to bond with Rescue Me, the way you would normally bond with a well-produced, well-acted, sparky-dialogued show, is that it's all a bit too disjointed. The link between all the hectic events is Tommy, but he's so unreliable.

One minute he's sober and smiting his brow, telling Sheila he won't have a bar of the illicitly obtained insurance payout, next he's in a bottle shop forking over $200 for a bottle of whisky because he's just heard his daughter has run away.

You have no idea if he's drunk or sober, since he behaves equally erratically in either state, and this makes for uncertain continuity.

The only reliable point of focus is the male bonding in the fire station smoko room, a setpiece scene every week.

Here, some highly entertaining blokey conversations take place and the writers insinuate new hints of secrets and horrors to come, in scripting that approaches The Sopranos in quality.

* What do you think of Rescue Me? Post your comments below.

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