“Rescue Me” co creator Peter Tolan showed up at press tour this week, happy to be apart from Denis Leary, his creative partner who also stars in the series, now in its next-to-last season.
“He is an attention hog, and the secondhand smoke, really, I’m lucky to be alive, frankly, at this point,” he declared.
What loomed at the event was the “Rescue Me” finale for next season: How would the saga of Tommy Gavin end?
It looks now that it will coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which was the jumping off point for the series of New York City firemen.
Tolan says there was talk of a very dark ending – even of a suicide. But that seemed unfair to viewers.
Eventually, he says, they found “something that would justify the reason that people had stuck with the series all that time. And we actually found a hopeful place for that character.”
“The idea of the entire series is: will a person succumb to the pressures created by living through a life-changing experience?” Tolan says. I mean, is that going to destroy them or are they going to overcome it? And I think at the end Tommy does overcome it.”
To get there, though, there is a lot of darkness, which began with last week’s fifth episode of the sixth season.
“The fifth episode was the turning point for everything that happens from this point on,” Tolan says. “People always wondered if Tommy Gavin was going to hit bottom, and last week was it when he loses his daughter after a night of drinking, the two of them, and that really gave us sort of a starting point almost for the end.”
Everything that follows, all through next season will “follow a really strong line that ends in a very hopeful place.”
And it will be lighter than what was originally planned – a direct 9/11 remembrance.
“in writing it, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s 9/11, and it’s the end of this era for these characters, and it’s gonna be very profound,’ and we wrote a version that was that. But in the end, it didn’t turn out to be there. It turned out to be much lighter, and actually much more life-affirming and about the resiliency of people in the face of a tragedy.”
“Rescue Me” runs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.