Playing with Fire
FX's blistering hit kicks off summer TV
When
Rescue Me's rookie firefighter (caught reading
The Tao of Pooh) is told "a firehouse is no place for sensitive souls," it's hard to argue.
The sentiment just as easily applies to Rescue Me itself (Tuesdays at 10 pm/ET), and to FX dramas in general. This is extreme TV — raw and brutally naked in its adult emotions, language, humor, sexuality and violent rage. It's also magnificently entertaining, if you have the spine for it.
The third season of firehouse drama Rescue Me upholds FX's bold tradition of living on the edge, juggling dark tragedy and raunchy comedy without seeming sentimental or exploitative.
Much credit goes to star and cocreator Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin, a self-destructive train wreck of an antihero. How much more will he be asked to suffer? Last season he lost his only son in a hit-and-run, and his uncle is in jail for shooting the driver. His marriage and family in shambles, haunted by ghosts as he grabs at the vodka in his freezer, Tommy desperately leans on his rambunctious New York firehouse family of lovable, maddening screwups.
And wouldn't you know, they've just banned smoking at work, too. As if nerves weren't taut enough already.
What's smoking this summer is Rescue Me, with plenty of tantalizing and dangerous relationships (including one involving Susan Sarandon at her seductive Bull Durham best). In love, work and domestic war, everyone's playing with fire. It's often hilarious, but every laugh carries a bitter sting. The results aren't pretty. Great drama rarely is.
Anatomy of an Epidemic
The story of the global AIDS crisis is much more than a medical catastrophe. As PBS' invaluable Frontline series makes clear in its far-reaching two-night report The Age of AIDS (May 30 and 31; check listings), this is an epic account of social upheaval, politics and prejudice in the wake of a killer virus that mystified scientists and continues to resist a cure.
Hard to believe we've lived in the shadow of this pandemic for a quarter century. Frontline lays out the sobering history in lucid, absorbing detail, from the early '80s when AIDS was seen as a scourge affecting mainly gays and IV drug users in the U.S. ("These were people who were socially unacceptable in most people's minds," says a former assistant secretary of health.) Political inaction spurred activism that continues to this day. "Most of the time, HIV wins," says one observer, but the fight for prevention, treatment and education continues.
