Attack of the Insult Comics

Watching the kids watch shows like "America's Funniest Videos" with our newfound over the air broadcast TV; you realize how breathtakingly cruel and stupid people will be to each other to get a laugh. Parents will abuse their own children. Children their parents. And everybody turns on the animals. It's shocking. Disgusting. What does it say about us? Where are the light, naive days of "Candid Camera"? Certainly not in the opening of Sacha Baron Cohen's newest chien andalou. All the typical trots are trotted out against Cohen, but I take my own counsel. Most times I find him eerily repulsive. Except when he makes me laugh, which is more often than I'd care to admit, particularly with my teenage son present. The kids worship him without the reserve adults grit teeth over. And the grown ups, the people who should know better, just keep falling right down into his little nightmare hole, like flies to a Venus fly trap. They never emerge unscathed. It's funny as hell, if you can get past the fact that the anti-social behavior is neither real nor staged, but something grayer in between, the product of a very clever, but warped mind. So not surprising, that Ron Paul, and Boutros (Boutros) Boutros Ghali no particularly dim bulbs were stung by Mr. Cohen. In his Sixer's shirted Ali G guise, Cohen has nailed celebrities, newsmakers and world leaders of all stripes and subjected them to the most inarticulate outrageous bigoted abuse, disguised as interview journalism. When interviewed himself, as by Terry Gross a couple of years ago, he articulates a daring vision of comedy, a candid camera farce/assault for the digital age. As uncomfortable as his button pushing makes us, there are a couple of reasons at least to like this guy. He uses the media to tweak power and celebrity in ways we ourselves only wish to. He is this generation's Chaplin, a true subversive.

But you didn't hear me say that because I've been watching some of my must see TV away from the broadcast box. TG for Hulu. It enabled me after five years of delayed gratification, to fall hopelessly under the spell of a show I wasn’t even sure I’d like. I was fortunate enough to come well under Hulu’s June 14^th deadline and in a concerted three week marathon, went from Season 1 to Season 5 of FX's amazing "Rescue Me", starring Denis Leary, Callie Thorne and the luminous Andrea Roth. Never have a more compelling, ###'ed up group of characters inhabited the small screen. Mr. Leary and producer partner Peter Tolan have appropriated the tragedy of 9/11 and given it a human scale and trajectory through the lives and loves of the NYC firefighters of Truck 62, a group of, in the words of character Franco Riviera, “the brotherhood of dysfunctional action junkies.” The show is bracingly un-PC and with its "pinned to the edge" explicit depictions of all the darkest nooks and crannies of the human psyche, it must give even the liberal FX morality police agita. Janet Jackson got fined for a nipple slip. The FCC must be watching "Rescue Me" closer than I do. Hopefully, with a new administration, they have their own must see TV and will leave mine alone.

The leader of this pack of dogs is Tommy Gavin, as played by Mr. Leary. Turns out I had him all wrong. Leary and I are the same age. He’s the type of macho wiseass guy who picked on my type of guy as a kid. At the beginning of his career, it seemed he was just another insult comic, an indoor sunglasses wearing, sneer-faced, Dice-Clay cloned Mick comic more known for profanity- drenched humor than serious work. IMH. Oh, but in “Rescue Me” his ghosts and demons leap, dance and blaze all over the screen and it is absolutely gut-wrenching and mesmerizing. Like watching luxury cars crash in slow motion.

Wherever he goes, whether to the firehouse, his own uneasy bed, or the kitchen of his lover, Leary’s Gavin lugs his Marleyesque purgatory train, the visible, trash talking, punch throwing ghosts of Jesus, his dead cousin, brother and father as well as civilian others who've perished in flames Tommy has fought with so little regard for his own life. At first I thought the device a little obvious, but I soon realized that Tommy’s ghosts are Leary’s first clue that his asshole alpha stud puppy alter ego is human, sympathetic and far frailer than maybe even the talented Mr. Leary is willing to concede.

Tommy's on again, off again, on again affair with the bottle is one only an AA lifer could fully conceptualize. You feel the burning ache of his thirst in the back of your own throat as he contemplates a fifth of vodka, pours the tumbler, raises it, sets it down, raises it again, all the while screaming "Don't do it Tommy boy!" Still the guy is an asshole and his own worst enemy. He is a mysogynist. He burns all his bridges, buys his kids' love with money and undermines everybody who cares for him. What a paradox! I care so deeply for him and his whole band of merry misfits. ( I hope he never finds out!) I love when a character, through the integrity of the writing, rises from the table, like Frankenstein’s monster, a creature far greater than the sum of his parts. Denis, I hardly knew ye. But man, am I impressed!

Unlike Leary, Callie Thorne is an actress whose career I have followed for decades, before she played long-suffering Elena McNulty, wife to serial destructo boy detective Jimmy McNulty on HBO’s critically heralded “The Wire” and before that, Det. Laura Ballard on NBC’s amazing six year, ‘90’s-era “Homicide, Life on the Streets.” With her trademark sexy vulnerability and toughness, she stole scenes, shone in these relatively minor roles, playing second fiddle to bigger names and storylines. In every role she plays, you feel her absences from the screen like gravity and wait impatiently for her return.

Mr. Leary, to his eminent credit, understands this. He trained the spotlight and let slip the leash that other directors and writers have restrained the incredibly talented Ms. Thorne with and she leaps to deliver, oh God does she deliver as Sheila, the predatory, over-the-top, head-case, pill-popping, sex-starved, Tommy-loving widow of Gavin clan cousin, Jimmy Keefe, the firefighter who died in the second WTC tower’s collapse. In bed, in a chair, on a table, on the floor, she is every bit Leary’s femme foil and like him, displays no fear in her exploration of desire and fallibility. I can’t take my eyes off her. I would give body parts to watch Thorne and Leary rehearse. I think I'd finally truly get the writer/actor connection.

They are as unlikable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

They are as lovable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

I now wait with bated breath, hook and ladder, for Wednesday early, early mornings, when the previous week’s show is posted by FX after an agonizing eight day delay.

Another Hulu offering I didn’t think I’d warm to is Showtime’s “Dead Like Me” which I assumed would be yet another death-trip rip-off of HBO’s wildly popular “Six Feet Under.” Again, I got it wrong and I happily report I’m in love with 28 year Ellen Muth, who plays, no carries the show, as pug-faced, saucer-eyed 19 year old Georgia, a college drop-out office drone who is freakishly and summarily dispatched by a Russian space station toilet seat turned fiery reentry debris. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, instead of meeting her eternal reward, the unfinished George, aka "Toilet Seat Girl" is pressed reluctantly into yet another dead end job as an undead case worker, a grim reaper who harvests the souls of the living, seconds before their often gory denouements. The reaper squad receives daily assignments from the bureaucracy of death, but no pay or expense account for their grim but merciful tasks. So they must resort to some sordid and hilarious scavenging to keep it going 9-5 in the land of the living. Clever, though the writing isn't yet near as crisp or insightful as "6 Feet," yet it has its moments and the camera loves Muth. With her rolling eyes, deadpan voiceovers and fixed scowl turned smile; she outshines even thespier thesps Mandy Patinkin and Jasmine Guy, episode after episode. Watch this dead little lady rise like a phoenix.

It’s shows like these that make the last two decades the true golden era of the little screen. As long as talented writers and actors are allowed to parade and exorcise their demons on the little box, I will keep watching, far into the night, cheating sleep and drawing inspiration as I seek out the clues and tools for mining the veins buried deep in my own dark writer's heart. Television drama, written by writers, acted by actors, like reality, only better.