‘Rescue Me’ goes back to ground zero

Maybe it was MTV back in the day with its three-minute bursts of Cyndi Lauper and Lionel Richie. Or it could be the fact that the meat we eat has been injected with more questionable substances than Barry Bonds during his prime. But somewhere along the way, our national attention span has come to rival that of a fruit fly on spring break after its fourth beer bong.

On Sept. 12, 2001, millions swore they'd never forget the previous day's events. Firefighters were the new rock stars. And the media declared the end of the Trivial Age.

Now, we have Britney Spears' every nervous tic battling Octo-Mom for coverage in that same media. Which is all the more reason for Denis Leary to be out there, grabbing viewers by the collar and dragging them back to ground zero.

The tragedy always has been a part of Leary's "Rescue Me" (10 p.m. Tuesdays, FX). You couldn't make a series set in a New York firehouse without it. But this season is about 9/11 in the same way "Maury" has come to be about paternity tests and "Two and a Half Men" is all about sex jokes and laugh tracks.

A French journalist (Karina Lombard) has charmed her way into the lives of the 62 Truck's crew as she interviews them for a book about 9/11, dredging up old wounds and memories along the way.

Franco's (Daniel Sunjata) conspiracy theories about what really happened that day play out alongside powerful scenes and poignant monologues about the human cost of the attacks. And, this being "Rescue Me," both Leary's Tommy Gavin and his best friend, Lou (John Scurti), fall for the foreign beauty, with Lou writing down his 9/11 memories in a 46-page attempt to show her his sensitive side.

"Let me get this straight," Tommy tells him. "So you're taking the biggest tragedy in the history of the city, perhaps the country, and you're taking your feelings about it, which I know are real and genuine because you were there and you lived through it, but you are now reconstituting them so that you can get laid by a French broad. Is that right?"

"Yeah," Lou shrugs. "Pretty much."

Before last week's season premiere, and not counting some two- or three-minute minisodes, the dark comedy had been off the air for 18 months. And the time off seems to have done "Rescue Me" some good.

This year's first nine episodes are enough to make last season -- which was such a mess, you'd swear it was raised by Dina Lohan -- seem like one of Tommy's frequent bad dreams.

The shrink at his competency hearing this week fairly succinctly sums up most of last season's flaws: "You'd dress up in your dead cousin's gear and go out on calls with your crew and a crew on another shift. You'd hide in the truck, and you'd go out on calls as your dead cousin. The dead cousin thing, what is up with that?"

Other than that, there's very little looking back. The guys are running their own bar this season, which poses a few problems for recovering alcoholic Tommy, who's also saddled with sponsoring an overly needy AA member.

But the real news is the addition of Michael J. Fox, who turns up in a handful of episodes as the new boyfriend of Tommy's ex-wife (Andrea Roth). Honestly, at this point, any chance you have to see Fox perform is a gift. But here, he's playing so far against type as a pill-popping drunk with anger issues, and doing it so convincingly, that he can start clearing space for yet another Emmy.

"Rescue Me" still isn't perfect. Leary can be a little self-indulgent, writing himself some pretty showy scenes of Tommy confronting his demons. But the series has regained its footing just in time for FX.

The channel, once basic cable's premier home for original dramas, is facing increasing competition from AMC, USA and TNT, not to mention the rise of pay-cable's Showtime and the resurgence of HBO.

Now, its signature series "The Shield" is gone. "Damages" followed up its brilliant, Emmy-nominated first season with a discombobulating downer of a second year. And "Nip/Tuck" not only jumped the shark, it went back, grabbed the shark, put it on a train and then wrecked the train.

Thankfully, "Rescue Me" is back on the scene with a whopping 22 episodes, up from the usual 13, that should buy FX some time to regroup and develop another crop of standout series.

That is, assuming it can keep its viewers' attention for that long.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.