HBO has an unmatched reputation for airing original prestige shows, but sometimes it’ll still let a pitch for a great series slip through its fingers. Years before HBO executives inexplicably passed on “Mad Men,” they squandered their chance to run the hit firefighter dramedy “Rescue Me.” In a 2011 interview with Hollywood Reporter, co-creator and lead star Denis Leary recalled how the heads at HBO enjoyed their idea for the show but wanted it in a different format.
“HBO came back and said they had notes and they preferred it as a half-hour comedy,” Leary said. Both Leary and co-creator Peter Tolan came from comedy backgrounds, but their show was aiming for a more somber tone more befitting for a story about New York firefighters coping with their trauma from 9/11. Luckily for Leary and Tolan, they found a channel for their show that was open to an hour-long drama format: FX, which was not as widely respected as HBO at the time.
“FX was a dark horse,” Leary said. In the early 2000s FX was best known for airing reruns of TV shows from other networks, whereas HBO already boasted a large collection of original, award-winning shows. Still, Leary and Tolan were impressed by how much the FX executives’ vision for “Rescue Me” aligned with their own. As Leary explained, “When we went in, they were incredibly smart with their notes.”
Rescue Me helped FX transform into a prestige cable channel
Denis Leary revealed another dealbreaker note from HBO: They wanted half the show to be filmed in Toronto, Canada. This was a problem, he explained, because “we knew that New York was a character.” FX allowed the show to be filmed almost entirely within the NYC metro area, giving it the authentic edge it was aiming for.
FX may not have seemed like as safe a bet as HBO at the time, but that didn’t stop “Rescue Me” from being an instant hit that ran for seven seasons. When the show premiered in 2004, FX was airing “The Shield” and the dark dramedy “Nip/Tuck,” but large stretches of the channel’s yearly slate featured no new original TV at all. By the time Season 2 of “Rescue Me” aired, FX had committed to airing original programming year-round for its first time ever, and it has stuck to that type of schedule ever since.
