Local boy makes good Denis Leary’s sweet redemption; plus, Joey BY JOYCE MILLMAN

Denis Leary’s short-lived 2001 ABC series, The Job, was a rough-edged and very funny black comedy, with Leary playing a burnt-out, pill-popping, alcoholic New York City police detective in full-on jackhammering anger mode. ("A bottle of Bushmill’s is the only thing keeping me from taking hostages.") On The Job, which Leary made with producer/writer Peter Tolan (The Larry Sanders Show), the free-floating cynicism and discontent of Leary’s stand-up comedy found full, rich context. His character, Mike McNeil, was a man in more pain than he could coherently express, and his blue-streak venom was his cry from the soul. The message of The Job was the message Leary the stand-up star had been trying to deliver all along: the world is a shitty place, even when you try to do the right thing — no, especially when you try to do the right thing. Leary is pissed off at the people who make the world a shitty place, and being a Catholic boy, he’s pissed off at God for making the shitty people who make the world such a shitty place. But most of all, Leary is pissed off at himself for not being able to fix the shittiness.

Not that he hasn’t tried. His most recent bio sheet devotes more time to his charity work than to his career. And I admit, I started reading this stuff with skepticism. But I felt, well, smacked down when I reached the part about his Leary Firefighters Foundation, the charity he started after the 1999 Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse blaze that killed six firefighters, including his cousin and a childhood friend. Leary’s foundation provides financial assistance to the families of firefighters killed in the line of duty, and it has purchased a state-of-the-art training tower and other equipment for the Worcester Fire Department. I haven’t even mentioned his benefit hockey games for Cam Neely’s cancer charity and Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s foundation.

Why is it that people who try to be, you know, good are looked at with suspicion by the rest of us cynics? I wonder whether that fact of life carries the sting of irony for Leary, whose stand-up persona helped forge the late-’80s and ’90s comedy culture of cynicism. In any case, Leary’s new comedy drama, Rescue Me (FX, Wednesdays at 10 p.m.) is brave, complicated, funny, and sad. Leary and Tolan have taken the vibe of The Job and transferred it to a show about New York firefighters in the aftermath of September 11. But Rescue Me has a surprisingly unsentimental attitude toward firefighters in particular and heroism in general. The show’s first episode set the tone with a mordant, snort-out-loud scene in which a firefighter lamented the declining number of women who wanted to sleep with him since the glory days following September 11. Leary’s character, firefighter Tommy Gavin, nodded in wistful agreement. "How soon they forget," he answered sagely. "How soon they forget." (Real firefighters, it appears, love the show.) Rescue Me, which is a bit more than halfway through its 13-episode first season and has been renewed for another, is Leary’s masterpiece. It’s a surly, moving show about flawed people who do good, even heroic, things.

Filmed in New York City, Rescue Me is set in the fictional Manhattan Engine Company 62, which is supposed to have lost four men in the Twin Towers on September 11. (A recent episode included Tommy’s eerie flashback to the elongated moments after he and his crew first entered one of the towers.) It goes without saying that these guys suffer from survivor’s guilt. The aging homophobic chief, Jerry Reilly (Jack McGee), beats up a retired gay firefighter who had outed gay firefighters who died on September 11. Lieutenant Kenny Shea (the exquisitely sarcastic John Scurti) secretly writes poems about September 11 in his basement. With its dark, scabrous wit and hand-held camerawork, Rescue Me recalls that gem of a cop show Homicide: Life on the Street. Indeed, it matches that show in its intense depiction of urban warriors under pressure.

Among Engine Company 62’s September 11 casualties was Tommy Gavin’s cousin Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey), who was also his best friend. Jimmy is now the most garrulous of the many ghosts who follow Tommy around. Yes, Tommy sees and hears dead people — an over-used plot device these days. But there are times when the ghosts who trail him (an expanding assemblage of souls whom he tried to but couldn’t save) provide a lovely image of the persistence of memory.

Not that you need to see the ghosts to know that Tommy is haunted. The senior firefighter on the truck, he’s a wise-cracking, heavy-drinking guy’s guy. And make no mistake, Rescue Me is loaded with blue-collar male angst and guy humor — one recent episode included both a dick-measuring contest and a pet monkey. But women should not fear Rescue Me; like Tommy, the show has a tender, wounded heart that flashes like a homing beacon through the bluster of the firehouse bonding and the grit of its characters’ personal lives.

Tommy and his wife, Janet (Andrea Roth), are separated, but Tommy refuses to let go. He lives across the street, spies on Janet, and uses their three kids as accomplices and bargaining chips. In one horrifyingly funny scene, he lines the kids up and lays piles of $20, $10, and $5 bills on the kitchen table in an attempt to extract information about Janet’s new boyfriend, a suit named Roger. Tommy also uses his police-detective brother (an amusing cameo by Dean Winters) to have Roger falsely arrested. And in a story line perhaps inspired by the Worcester Cold Storage fire, he harasses the squatters who started a blaze in which a firefighter was killed, unable to come to terms with how their "worthless" lives were spared while "a good man" died.

Tommy is a hothead, a loudmouth, a wise-ass, a jealous husband, a skirt chaser, an addict, a very lapsed Catholic (though he does admit to his parish priest that he is kind of into the "David Blaine-David Copperfield aspect of bein’ a Catholic"), and a caring father who makes some appalling decisions. He is punished, time and again. And as much as you like the guy’s straightforwardness, tenacity, and flaky ingenuity, you’re not unhappy to see him get what he deserves — a vicious beating from Roger’s friends, for example, or Janet’s constant, weary disapproval. Yet despite his failings, Tommy is a born leader. Good acts do not necessarily choose good people to perform them. And though he may be a cynic, he’ s saddled with a stubborn belief in his duty to others. People come to him with their burdens — the guys on the squad, Jimmy’s lonely widow, Tommy’s addled dad — and Tommy can’t turn them away. He may not be a saint, but he’s the guy you want next to you when the building’s on fire.

IT DIDN’T SEEM LIKE MUCH on paper, but creating a Friends spinoff around Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani character turns out to be a stroke of not-stupidity. Joey (NBC, Thursdays at 8 p.m.) takes the goofy dim bulb and plugs him into a sort-of family sit-com set in Los Angeles, where Joey has moved to further his acting career. Joey’s sister Gina lives in LA with her brainy 20-year-old son, Michael, who’s a rocket scientist. Yes, a real rocket scientist. The sheltered, neat-freak boy genius and the idiot Uncle Joey become roommates in what must be the zillionth Odd Couple retread, and yet it works. LeBlanc’s lovable cluelessness is still, well, lovable. Paulo Costanzo’s Michael is an adorably geeky straight man. The humor is Friends-quirky. (Joey’s apartment looks out at the middle of the "Hollywood" sign, which is thereafter always referred to as the "ollywoo" sign.) Joey is exactly what it should be.

But let’s face it. You’re not watching Joey because you have a burning need to keep Joey Tribbiani in your life. No. If you have an ounce of self-respect, you are watching Joey for its real star: Adriana. Yes, Gina is played by Drea de Matteo, the Emmy-nominated (how I love saying that!) co-star of The Sopranos, whose character, Adriana La Cerva, met an untimely demise last season. Oh, Ade, life has not been the same since Silvio took you for that ride. But here you are, alive, in one piece, not sleeping with the fishes — and on network TV, too! Somewhere in New Jersey, Christufuh is weeping.

On Joey, de Matteo’s sassy, gum-snapping, whip-smart Gina looks a lot like Adriana in her sprayed-on low-riders and Jimmy Choos. Pregnant at 16, now a hairdresser and single mom, Gina Tribbiani is living the kind of life that Ade became a mob moll to escape, except that, you know, Ade is now resting in a cement drum. Anyway, de Matteo has already attained pop-cultural iconhood, and it’s nice to report that she is more than just a nasal whine and a Jersey manicure. She has a sunny, sympathetic presence and decent comic timing, even when she has to deliver sight gags about Gina’s pumped-up boobs. De Matteo has wisely kept Adriana’s severely pulled back yet cascading hairdo, sphinx-like eyeliner, and winged brows. She has the most entrancing poker face since 1970s Cher. She is a slut goddess. Bow down to her! Bow down, I command you!