TV with MeeVee: Denis Leary Says: Take "Rescue Me" In Smaller Doses

"Kids today have a very short attention span," Denis Leary said. "That whole YouTube thing, which I’m guilty of, going on YouTube and watching the, you know, overly dramatic squirrel and all that stuff."

The always-sardonic Leary was promoting the new five-minute "minisodes" of his series "Rescue Me," which debut at 10 p.m. tonight and for the next nine Tuesdays on FX. The minisodes will also be available on Crackle.com and other online outlets after the broadcast.

"If you can get three to five minutes or six or seven minutes and people can get on and watch it ... that’s a form of advertising, I guess. It may hopefully bring some people to the show that haven’t been there before," Leary said.

Last week, Leary and executive producer Peter Tolan got on the phone with a group of bloggers to talk about the minisodes and the next season of "Rescue Me." The conference call began this way:

Operator: Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to register a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, press the 1 followed by the 3. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before entering your request.

Denis Leary: Jeez, did you hear this fucking thing? That’s complicated.

"Rescue Me" is one show for which the writers strike was both good news and bad news. Good news because FX committed to an expanded 22-episode season, up from its usual 13. Bad news because that season won't start until early 2009. So FX boss John Landgraf suggested the minisodes to keep "Rescue Me" in viewers' minds. Because of the expanded season, Leary and Tolan already have "Rescue Me" in production this summer. So they've been stealing an hour here and half a day there to work on the minisodes.

"Rescue Me" weaves together comedy and tragedy in following the lives of New York firefighter Tommy Gavin (Leary) and his co-workers, on and off the job. The minisodes give us an extra peek inside the characters, along with a laugh or two.

Among the first three, "Fantasy" gives us a look into Tommy's dream life - and how it can complicate the dormitory arrangements at the firehouse. "Fast" finds a member of the crew doing a natural "cleanse" of his system, earning much abuse. "Criteria," maybe the best of the three, finds the crew gathered around their kitchen table, debating what makes a good bar, a subject Tommy knows all too intimately.

Tolan said, "There’s a couple of things as we’ve been writing them that not only foreshadow stories that we know are occurring in Season Five, but they also weirdly, psychologically tie into some of the past knowledge that we have of these characters and that the audience has too. Some of them are just out there for laughs and some of them are - we just shot one that is a little more dramatic."

The writing is as sharp as ever: "Hot bartender is the definition of false hope." Tommy says at one point. It's also as raunchy as ever, as when mention of yuppie drinking habits causes Tommy to remark, "Gin is for James Bond and other British pussies."

An edited transcript follows...

Question: I was just wondering what are the challenges of writing and filming in five minute increments as opposed to your usual, you know, 42- to 44-minute segments?

Denis Leary: The challenges? Well the challenges, I guess physically we’re adding them into the schedule that we’re already shooting and because we’re shooting 22 episodes we have a lot of work in front of us.
But the (fun) of it is that we know like the first few are just purely comedy for comedy’s sake. And even, I guess yesterday we finished shooting one that has a more dramatic element to it.

Peter Tolan: If there’s a challenge, it’s just that, you know, we usually have all that time to tell stories and you’re sort of not forced into a beginning, middle and end thing in that short of a time frame. But it’s a fun challenge and, you know, more than anything we just want to have a good time with those and have them be comedy heavy, and really show off our guys.

Question: How have the fans responded to that news (that full episodes won't return until march '09)?

Denis Leary: I’m spending a lot of time working on rescues so it’s not - usually if I see the fans it’s like outside The Daily Show or the David Letterman show the other night. They - I think they want us to get - because usually we’re on the air now, so they want us to be on the air. But when you tell them listen we’re coming out next March, coming on for 22 weeks straight, they go oh, that’d be great. I know when I was a "Sopranos" fan, when "The Sopranos" was off for like a year and a half or two years at a time, everybody would complain and say, you know, I’m so mad and I’m so pissed and how can they do this? And I would just go yeah whatever because it was my favorite show. So when it came on, I would just - I would watch it. So look it, we wish it was on, too but I think when it comes back on it’ll be such a giant bunch of episodes, I think they’ll be very - hopefully not sated - not completely sated, but somewhat satisfied.

Peter Tolan: And what I’m saying to our fans now -- and it’s not - it’s certainly not hyperbole, it’s the absolute truth -- the first six episodes that we’ve finished here are some of the best episodes we’ve ever done in the life of the series. So when we come back, we’re coming back very strong and in a relentless way. All these episodes are really, really strong. So people will definitely be rewarded for their long wait.

Question: Okay, thank you.

Peter Tolan: And that’s a totally unbiased opinion from the co-creator of the show.

Denis Leary: My wife said that she felt they were really good.

Question: I was just wondering what keeps Tommy together after all the deaths he’s experienced recently: his son, his brother, his chief and now his father?

Denis Leary: Well the thing I think that’s always kept him together -- as with a lot of firefighters in real life who - especially in New York, you know, guys who lived through 9/11 and have been through a lot of life and death -- is the idea of work. It’s just keeping themselves off the truck and therefore, they don’t get a chance to think about the past because they’re so involved in the present and the fire that might happen in five minutes or the fire that they just arrived at.

You know, they sort of have that at present sense of like there’s a game tomorrow, you know, and I got to be ready. But I think in a strange way his father’s death is kind of the final straw for him because he doesn’t really - it’s - you know, it’s the death that you most expect because it’s a person who is old or a person who is ill that can sometimes be the most effective one because it’s - you think it is going to be easy and it’s not.

And I think that’s - the first six episodes, seven episodes that Peter is talking about this year underneath everything that’s happening is (unintelligible) Tommy. I think in the first episode we established the fact that Tatum’s character, his cousin Mickey, his Uncle Teddy, even the guys on the crew - they’re all sort of kind of still upset about the loss of his father and he seems to be unaffected by it. And then gradually it comes to literally haunt him to the point where he has to finally deal with not only his father’s death, but his father’s death is kind of like the exclamation point at the end of the sentence. And it involves his son’s death and all the guys on 9/11, et cetera, you know.

Question: Whose idea was it to do the minisodes?

Dennis Leary: John Landgraf who is the head of FX, who has come up with a lot of good ideas over the year - more than Peter and I would like to admit because he has (done) so many times on "Rescue Me," he has said but if you guys did this and we go god dammit, why didn’t we think about that?

Peter and I and Evan Reilly, the other writer on the show, we’re not the kind of guys who actually wrote anything for the show while we were on strike. You know, we actually - we would talk but we didn’t actually punch any keys on the computer. I love this thing when the strike ends on a Sunday night and Monday morning some of these shows have four scripts ready to shoot that they saved - apparently wrote Sunday night. So we were pushed back on the writing anyway.

John wanted to run "The Shield" after the two conventions and the Olympics which occur in August and September this year - which automatically meant that we would have to go in either January which is when I think "24" comes back after having like a long hiatus because of the strike or we would wait until the springtime which is closer to when we normally air.

And that would leave 18 or 19 months with us off the air. And so this show is built on comedy and drama. That’s always been one of our things from the beginning which is organic to any firehouse, the idea of black humor versus absolute black sudden death. So we have something that other dramas don’t have. I don’t think you could do a three-to-five minute mini-episode of "The Sopranos" because you’d have to what, like wax somebody, have a meal, you know what I mean, and then have Tony having sex with a prostitute.
You know, it doesn’t work.

But on this show, because we have these comic conversations that occur in the firehouse and in the truck, it was a natural element that we could pull off. And I think when John said I’d like to have you guys go on the air and give people something to remember the show by while we’re on hiatus, we thought it was a really, really good idea.

Question: You mentioned Tatum (O'Neal). She’s been in the news lately (a crack bust). What does that do to the show?

Denis Leary: Nothing. We don’t have a legal issue. She has been in for a couple episodes already. She did great work and she immediately went back to work herself in terms of taking care of whatever she needed to take care in her private life. So she’s doing terrific and she’s got a home here. I mean, we’ve got - she’s supposed to come back to work soon because we’ve got her next round of stuff coming up in, I think, the next one or two episodes. So our concern was mostly about her private life and making sure she was okay. But in terms of her work here, she was terrific when she was here at the beginning of the season. We can’t wait for her to come back. So we don’t have any issue with her, you know.

Question: Did the long layoffs and the extra time, you know, getting - did that kind of change anything you were doing or refocus any stories you’re working on for the coming year?

Denis Leary: I think it just made us - it made us...

Peter Tolan: It probably...

Denis Leary: ...more than anything, anxious to get back to work.

Peter Tolan: Yeah.

Denis Leary: And as we were more - as we - the more anxious we got about let’s get in there, we started to actually get more excited. And, you know, you want to go into the fifth season of a show facing 22 episodes when you normally do 13 fully excited about the project you’re working on. And we really - we got there and we’re still there - now six or seven, or eight episodes in as we’re breaking them. So it’s really a - it’s actually great. And I think it actually helped a little bit.
I think now I realize, you know, Peter and I are both from Massachusetts and I’m finding a link between how well the Red Sox are playing and how good our writing is. It seems to me that the Red Sox play well, we write well and so I’m hoping they’re not going to go into a slump because then we’ll find out for certain.

MeeVee's Question: We’ve been hearing so much about Internet distribution and mobile distribution. And I’m just wondering if that - you know, does that affect the way you do things technically? What do you think about the idea that somebody might be watching these on their cell phone?

Denis Leary: Well I have a hard time. I have kids. I have teenagers and they watch stuff on their iPods and on their telephones. And, you know, to me it’s like for the first time in my life pretty much wherever you go there’s giant plasma television screens which are barely big enough for me. I really like gigantic televisions. So the idea of going back to look at something on my - I can barely see the telephone numbers on my phone, you know. I really don’t care how they watch them, as long as they watch them. But I like to watch stuff like on the - remember when we used to go to the drive-ins?

Peter Tolan: Sure.

Denis Leary: That’s the size screen I want for the living room.

Peter Tolan: Yeah. Somebody just asked me, because I just made movie earlier this year that’s coming out very soon -- June 27 by the way in case anybody is looking for it --

MeeVee: And what was the name of that movie?

Peter Tolan: I’m sorry, did you ask me? It’s called "Finding Amanda." It stars Matthew Broderick and Brittany Snow, and the lovely Maura Tierney. Somebody said to me, Don’t you feel awful that you’ve spent so much time and, you know, color correction and everything, and people are going to be watching this on their phone and whatever? And, you know, really I’m not that much of an artist that I’m - it can only be one way. But at the same time, I’m not going to be shooting a show or a movie with the idea that it’s going to end up on a little screen. I mean, somebody at one point said to me don’t do like long shots and stuff like that because they won’t play on those tiny screens. I’m like, that isn’t going to work. I’m just going to make it the way I’m going to make it.

Denis Leary: Imagine watching Lawrence of Arabia on your phone, you know.

Peter Tolan: I didn’t think that desert was that big.#