Rescue Me: Summer TV's Bravest Drama
Check your TV's thermostat. If the temperature's rising to alarming new levels, boiling over with riotous politically incorrect humor and scorching the screen with personal drama that's as wrenching as it is raunchy, you must be watching
Rescue Me (Wednesdays, 10 pm/ET on FX).
In its fourth season, FX's bravely unsparing tragicomedy about a twisted brotherhood of New York firefighters is more obsessed than ever with outmoded codes of manliness. These flawed, funny antiheroes bust each other's chops at any sign of vulnerability, but the joke is almost always on them.
Not that Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), the crew's No. 1 jokester, is in a laughing mood. He's under investigation for insurance fraud after last season's climactic beach fire, set by psycho Sheila (Callie Thorne). A fire from which he was rescued by a woman: Nona (Jennifer Esposito), a volunteer firefighter who's the sexual aggressor in their new relationship.
Nona mocks Tommy as a "princess" for wanting to take it slow. Imagine if she knew he was stealing moments with Oprah and Dr. Laura, or coveting the probie's face cream (approved by Home Shopping Network). Tommy getting in touch with his feminine side? You have to see it to believe it.
This season, the women often appear more macho than the men. Newlywed Sean is shocked by the porn addiction of wife Maggie (Tommy's sister), Lou is worn out from his sexually voracious ex-nun girlfriend, and even studly Franco seems tamed by love.
As these guys, and the gals who love and loathe them, do battle with the profane inner fires that threaten to consume them, Rescue Me once again stakes its claim as one of TV's most blisteringly entertaining adult hours.
Organic Drama
The downside of having a megahit like The Closer? Trying to find another show with comparable power. After failing with the ultraviolent Wanted and the edgy Saved, TNT is aiming for the tear ducts with Heartland (Mondays, 10 pm/ET), an earnest but sluggish medical drama with an undeniably gripping hook.
The subject: organ donations and transplants, a field of medicine where sorrow coexists with joy. Treat Williams (Everwood) dons scrubs again as a surgeon literally on the cutting edge at the Pittsburgh center where his ex-wife (Invasion's alluring Kari Matchett) coordinates the organ-donor program.
No question the show's heart is in the right place, but where's the pulse? The blandness is especially acute in the personal subplots, which require Matchett to be snippy one moment, supportive the next. When she tells her ex, "I'll take my heart elsewhere" (metaphor alert), it's enough to make you heartsick.
