'Rescue Me' and its hero Tommy Gavin move on

More consistent than Damages, more real and true than The Shield (ghosts and all), Rescue Me (10 ET/PT) ends a sterling seven years tonight, four days before the anniversary of the attacks that stoked its creative fires. Let other series rush to return to normal. Rescue Me and its damaged, driven hero Tommy Gavin— so brilliantly played by co-creator Denis Leary— insisted "normal" was no longer an option.

Tonight, though, in a touching 80-minute finale that provides the kind of closure fans desire without closing out the show's fictional universe, Tommy finally begins to move on. And he does so by using the latest tragedy to come to terms with its first one.

It isn't giving anything away to tell you Tommy does, indeed, survive; Leary and the show's other driving force, Peter Tolan, had promised Tommy would not die. They made no such promises for his squad mates, and it would be unreasonable for anyone who has ever been exposed to Rescue Me's clear-eyed assessment of the risks life involves to expect all of them to make it out alive.

Death, of course, is nothing novel on TV. What Rescue Me brought to the mix was its wild Irish-wake approach to mortality — the grand, sometimes frantic swings between tragedy and comedy that rejected any idea of a blasé acceptance of the inevitable. From Tommy on down, the characters in Rescue Me lived life to the fullest, so much so that when they died, they sometimes refused to go.

Building a show around a main character who was literally and figuratively haunted was always a risk, one compounded by Leary's fearless willingness to push that character past the limits of propriety. Tommy's flaws and obsessions were often played for laughs, but just as often they were allowed to explode into moments of brutal, painful rage.

Yet rage was hardly the only color in Rescue Me's palette. This is a show that was willing to let its characters do and say any manner of comically socially unacceptable things, knowing the cast could redeem them. And what a wonderful cast, starting with Leary and including John Scurti, Daniel Sunjata, Steven Pasquale, Michael Lombardi, Adam Ferrara, Larenz Tate, Lenny Clarke and two invaluable women, Callie Thorne and Andrea Roth.

Rescue Me ends tonight as it began: Tommy addressing a group of rookies. He still doesn't have the answer to his survivor's guilt, but he now knows that he "can't drink or fight or screw" his way to figuring it out. For Tommy, that's a huge step. And TV is all the better for having watched him take it.