Denis Leary is a very smart man and Rescue Me is a very smart television show. By that I mean it is self-aware and self-reflexive. It knows it’s a TV program and therefore avoids the pitfall of taking itself too seriously. Hence all the firehouse nonsense and the immature antics of the resident clowns, White Sean (because there’s a Black Shawn too) and Mike.

Yet Rescue Me delves into some of the most serious issues facing people who put their lives on the line every day. What other TV fare probes the depths of chronic alcoholism and the boundless hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, implicitly fusing the two into a destructive vortex that devastates just about everyone who comes into contact with it?

Each successive and successful season reveals more clearly the dark irony of the show’s title.

Tommy Gavin, the best firefighter in all the five boroughs of New York City, the seemingly indestructible superman who will charge without hesitation into any burning building to save helpless victims, is himself in the greatest need of rescue.

Tommy is a hero of Homeric proportions, an Achilles with a vulnerable heel as exaggerated in size as the mercurial metropolis he inhabits. For he could only exist in post 9/11 Manhattan, as the massive guilt born of his surviving that disastrous attack is a prime source of his bottomless psychic grief.

The end of season five found him bleeding out on the floor of the downtown bar owned by the firehouse gang. He was shot in the shoulder by his ex-con uncle Teddy because he (Tommy) had poured the drinks that Teddy’s beloved wife swallowed, which led to her intoxication and then her death in a car crash.

Season six greets Tommy on the mend after a dry month in the hospital. He skips out of physical therapy (because who needs that?) with a bag full of pain killers. Yes, it’s the same old Tommy who never learns, but his friends and family jump through some bizarre hoops to try to drive some sense into him.

But ultimately Tommy is as helpless (emotionally and spiritually) as the weakest fire victim he has ever rescued. Like his psychologically battered twin from the 1960s, Don Draper of Mad Men, Tommy is married to the most beautiful woman on the east coast, but can’t make the marriage work. Added to that, he is alienated from his children, and his most stable relationship seems to be with his dead cousin Jimmy Keefe (a 9/11 FDNY fallen hero) whom he argues with on a regular basis and with whose widow he maintains an exceedingly strange sexual bond.

As a true New Yorker might say, “Is this a freakin’ great show or what? Fuggetaboutit!” Tune in Tuesdays at 10 pm on FX.