Leaping from stress to stress, with little relief in sight

The Denis Leary drama, which premiered in 2004, is not directly about 9/11 so much as it is of 9/11, a TV product that trembles and erupts with life-changing incident and post-traumatic stress.

The catastrophes that plague firefighter Tommy Gavin every week aren't terrorist attacks; they are family deaths, fires, car accidents, alcoholic slips, rapes, betrayals. But as on 9/11, they drop out of the blue and leave ruin in their wake. They turn Tommy's life into a minefield.

What helps to make ``Rescue Me" an essential vestige of 9/11 is that it's not about holy war, directly or indirectly. Since that Tuesday morning, TV has been crammed with ``24"-like suspense series that play off terror cells, homeland security, and Muslim villains. But the New York-set drama evokes only how the attacks altered the ordinary American lives in the shadows of the towers that fell.

It has a strong parallel in the 1946 movie ``The Best Years of Our Lives," which captured the weight of World War II through the psychology of soldiers returning home, and not through battlefield or political action. On ``Rescue Me," too, the battles aren't global; they're personal, spiritual, religious.

Viewers have complained that the series jumps too flippantly from black comedy to tragedy and back again. But the schizoid tone of ``Rescue Me," which recently turned a funeral into a wedding, is a mark of its post-9/11 identity.

This is a discomforting show about people who can no longer relax and trust in safety; they can be laughing one moment, and watching people crash and burn the next. A couple like Tommy and Janet Gavin can find peace and then be violently driven apart by guilt over the death of their son. The writers want us to experience the same tonal leaps that now jar the lives of the show's firefighters, cops, and families. A smooth narrative on ``Rescue Me" would undermine its content.

``Rescue Me" portrays its share of specific emotional fallout from 9/11. Tommy and his fellow New York firefighters have bouts of survivor's guilt, and Tommy has self-loathing conversations with the ghost of his firefighter cousin who died on 9/11. But the show reaches beyond the specific and into a collective sense of jeopardy and disquiet, and that is its greatest power.

``Rescue Me" is a portrait of the aftershock of a disaster that shook the American psyche.

Matthew Gilbert is the Globe's television critic. He can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.