{alltv} 'Rescue Me' cast and crew fan the flames to the very end

NEW YORK — Six firefighters of Ladder 62 are standing in full gear in an empty, graffiti-covered warehouse, preparing to enter a smoky, dense blaze that will lead to a floor's collapse and the deaths of some of them.

On a hot day here last month, just two days before filming wrapped on the seventh and final season of FX's Rescue Me, the cast was in high spirits, mixing profanity-laced comedy with bitter tragedy.

They'd shot 19 episodes. Ten of them will air as the sixth season, beginning Tuesday (10 ET/PT), and nine more are due next summer, culminating — on screen and in real life — with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The actors say calling it quits after 93 episodes is bittersweet. "We all get along so great that we're going to be sad to say goodbye, but I'm excited to play somebody other than the dumb guy," says Steven Pasquale of his clueless Sean Garrity.

"I think it's run its course," says John Scurti, whose rotund wisecracking old-timer, Lt. Kenny "Lou" Shea, "strikes a chord with real firemen."

And star, co-creator and co-writer Denis Leary calls the timing "organically perfect," adding it's "better than working with an elephant in (bleeping) Indonesia," as he did in the 1995 Disney bomb Operation Dumbo Drop.

He'll move on: He's writing and directing an FX buddy-comedy pilot, Two Chicks, starring Callie Thorne, who plays Sheila, his sometime girlfriend on Rescue Me. But "it's going to be really hard for us to find another premise that would involve this much drama and comedy," he says. "I'll miss that, turning on a dime."

It's also true of the real firefighters Leary counts as pals, some of whom work on the show as extras: "They'll say something incredibly funny that comes directly out of how sad they are, and that's been sort of the root of the show from the beginning."

But Leary's Tommy Gavin, the alcoholic, dysfunctional soul of the show, has seen it all: too much booze, estrangement from his wife, the deaths of his cousin, brother and young son, who reappear as ghosts that haunt him.

As the new season starts, he recovers from a gunshot wound inflicted by his uncle and vows (again) to quit drinking, even as he sees his 20-year-old daughter, Colleen, hit the sauce.

"The writing is as good as it's ever been, but there have been more times we've said, 'Didn't we do that? Haven't we paddled around in that water a couple of times?' " says co-creator Peter Tolan. And while this season starts off in a dark place, "in some ways the show has a lighter tone and is more comedic as we get toward the end."

Leary and Tolan say they'd always planned a dire finish for Tommy, perhaps having him swim off into the ocean or sacrifice himself in a fire to ensure his family's financial stability. But FX chief John Landgraf was looking for a more life-affirming exit.

"It's a show about heroism for a cynical age," Landgraf says. "It can be very funny, it can very moving, but the sentiment is very hard-earned in Rescue Me. And I think that was appropriate for the times." He considers the ending "optimistic," with a last-second twist that left crewmembers shocked.

It's Tommy's role to "bear the pain of survivor's grief," Landgraf says. As he does, Tommy turns for advice to a hip priest (Peter Gallagher) in four episodes this season. Budget cuts threaten to shutter the firehouse. And Maura Tierney, in her first role since her cancer treatment, returns for next season as a cancer survivor and "last temptation" for Tommy as he seeks to reconcile with wife Janet. "She's playing it raw and real, without any makeup, and she'd just come out of treatment so she had almost no hair," Leary says. "She's so ballsy on screen."

Ditto for the real firefighters, like Niels Jorgensen, a FDNYer who crashes through a fourth-story window on a ladder, then delivers a joke in one of the final episodes. "We all moonlight to make ends meet," he says. "We drive trucks, we build decks. But this is the coolest side job I've ever had."