Where the Soul Is

Hollywood has a bad reputation for quality. And, more often than not, it’s justified. But the truth is that there are gems out there, and there are writers whose every line should be studied by us in the same way that Tennessee Williams’, Eugene O’Neill’s and Edward Albee’s lines are studied and scrutinized.

We begin Storytellers with a four-article series, of which this is the last, concentrating on the top four writers or writing-teams working in television today. Most of their scripts are certainly worthy of study and re-examination, and yet the episodes we watch get old in our minds faster than yesterday’s newspaper.

The Top Four

In the top spot: David E. Kelley.

At number two: Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin maintains high quality more often than Kelley. But when Kelley’s good, he has an even wider range, sharper claws, and better drama.

In third place we had Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, writers of most of the first six seasons of Gilmore Girls.

And this week we get to talk about the writers in fourth place: Rescue Me’s creators and main writers, Peter Tolan and Denis Leary.

All these writers or writing-teams can write heart-wrenching drama; can have more laugh-out-loud comedy in a drama than can be found in most sitcoms; have a clear view on life, which they convey through their stories; can deliver stories that feel as intense and intensive as a two-hour movie; do not look down at their audience and do not talk down to it; and all four put their heart in their hands when they write well, and let us watch it bleed.

Peter Tolan and Denis Leary deserve special attention, because they created something rarely found in television or movies these days: A show with soul.

Apart or Together?

Leary and Tolan are not the same apart as they are together. We last saw them on separate shows.

Peter Tolan is best remembered for The Larry Sanders Show, a brilliantly-written show that was as cold as ice.

Denis Leary, meanwhile, wrote The Job, where he played, much like in Rescue Me, a macho, alcoholic cop who cheats on his wife and can’t handle life. But at the end of the day, The Job wasn’t about anything, and its plots were all over the place. Although Peter Tolan was around, his presence was not felt in the writing. This was Leary’s show.

A few years later, when the two collaborated in writing and creating Rescue Me, it seems that each gave the other what he lacked. Tolan gave Leary structure, while Leary gave Tolan the soul he needed. Together, they created a show that’s actually about something.

Tough Guys and Tortured Souls

Rescue Me is about people who hold it in and what they go through when life gets tough. It is about the virtues and faults of holding it in. But mostly, it’s about what happens to people who don’t break when they finally do break.

Before we get to the stuff that breaks the characters down, let’s meet them.

Tommy, played by Leary, is an alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping New-York Irish fireman who cheats on his wife, Janet, and comes from a long line of alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping Irish firemen who cheat on their wives. He has three kids and when we meet him, he’s going through a divorce, and is spying on his wife, unable to let her go.

Here he is, in season 1, explaining why the guys at work don’t know he stopped drinking: “I quit drinking in front of family, so that Janet would think that I really quit drinking so I could get back together with her, but I didn’t tell the guys at work I quit drinking because I didn’t want them to think it’s a sign of weakness, or that, you know, I was having some kind of sudden change, like I was losing it. Plus it allowed me to keep drinking while I was going to AA.”

Tommy’s firehouse is filled with men who are the archetype ‘tough guys’: macho, homophobic, and emotionally unavailable. Firefighters are heroes to Leary and Tolan, but they are as flawed as any of us. For example:

Tommy is talking with Franco about last night’s escapades. Halfway through, Tommy says, “What I can’t believe is you making a move on a chick with sideburns.”

To which Franco replies: “Hey, Tommy, it’s getting slow out there, pal. All that pussy I was getting after 9/11? Now nothing. People forget.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says. “Sad commentary.”

Acerbic, cynical people. And real.

Here’s another example of how Leary and Tolan write their tough guys:

Someone anonymously posted a poem they wrote in the firehouse.

Tommy reads it allowed, then ridicules it.

The author says, “I don’t know, it’s not that bad. It rhymes.”

“So what,” says Tommy. “My ten-year-old can make stuff rhyme. It doesn’t mean he’s the next, uh... Name a poet.”

“Angie Dickinson,” says one firefighter.

“Angie Dickinson? From Police Woman?”

Franco, puffing on his cigarette, says, “Nah, I think you mean Emily Dickinson, from the Belle of Amherst.”

Tommy looks at him, surprised, “You know poetry?”

“Nah,” he puffs on his cigarette again. “I jacked off to a picture of her once, when I was eleven.”

But it’s not the comedy that gives Rescue Me its soul, and not the dialogue. It’s the broken, shattered people. The show is populated with tough people with tough lives who don’t know what to do when things get too tough. One of Tommy’s firefighting friends has a gay son with which he cannot talk and a wife with Alzheimer who forgets she’s married. Another firefighter's daughter is rushed to the hospital because she took his pills, but that's not enough for him to be able to quit taking them. Tommy’s wife takes the kids, sells the house, and all four disappear.

Jimmy, also a firefighter, was Tommy’s cousin and best friend, and he died on 9/11. His wife, Sheila, can’t stop crying and can’t find a man. She gets drunk and hits on Tommy: “I can’t meet anybody. I can’t get Jimmy out of my mind. He’s always there. You are the closest thing I have to him. You’re sweet. You’re funny. And you’re here. Right now. Right here. Christ, you lost Jimmy, you just lost Billy Warren, I mean how long do you think all of us have?”

Tommy is haunted by the ghosts of the people he didn’t save, including Jimmy’s. The dead people follow him, talk to him, and haunt his dreams as well as his waking life.

When Tommy’s mother dies unexpectedly, his father begins to cry: “You know, my father cried a lot towards the end of his life. He never cried before then. Probably not even as a baby. But near the end, you looked at him cross-eyed, and he’d bust out bawling. It’s the ghosts, Tommy.”

Tommy suddenly takes a greater interest in this, “It’s the what?”

“All the people you’ve hurt, all the meanness you did. You get old, you stop moving a million miles a minute. It all comes back. It really shows up again. All you can do... All you can do is cry.” And he does. Too embarrassed, he waves Tommy off, “Go on, get out of here! Make your suck-ass coffee!”

Tommy and all the men in the firehouse and their families don’t know how to break. Leary and Tolan throw at their characters everything they can, making their lives as hard as possible, to see how they would react. To teach us, to teach the characters, and to teach themselves something more about human nature.

Three extreme examples of how tough things get and what happens then:

After his wife kidnaps the kids, sells the house, and disappears, Tommy hits rock bottom. He soaks himself in vodka, and lights the lighter, inching it closer towards his body.

Halfway through the show, just as his life is getting back in order, and as everything with his wife is good again, their son is killed in a mindless hit-and-run. How do you deal with something as horrible as that? And how does someone like Tommy, who can’t deal with anything, deal with something like that?

Another unbearable, unforgettable moment of television comes a few episodes later. His own brother is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s ex-wife. One episode revolves around the fact that one of the firefighters in Tommy’s firehouse is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s crazy sister, constantly telling us how Tommy beat her last boyfriend within an inch of his life. This helps set up Tommy’s mindset and, at the same time, blindside us to the main event. Towards the end of the episode, in a family event, Tommy sees his brother and his ex-wife touching under the table.

In an amazing piece of acting, Tommy completely loses it: We see the wires snap inside his brain, as he just looks at them. Then, with absolutely no warning, he leaps across the table, no longer entirely sane, and beats his brother. He throws him all over the place, then into the street, throws his head through the car of a window, kicks him, and, spitting on him, leaves him half-dead on the road.

There is a difference between this drama in Rescue Me and the dramatic turns that appear in shows like ER and Third Watch. The last two have drama for drama's sake, because it keeps the audience glued to the set. Something is burning inside Leary, and he and Tolan keep writing situations that return to the same thing: breaking the unbreakable people. And during that process, Leary makes us feel for an hour what he feels all the time, and we all learn something about human nature.

The Gilmore Girls and the Domino Effect

The Gilmore Girls is not what it used to be. Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino have left The Gilmore Girls at the end of the last season. Together, they created the show, wrote about 75 percent of it, and directed quite a few episodes.

Unfortunately for the writers left behind, the Palladinos’ dialogue has always outshined the others, being smarter, funnier, faster, and better at both comedy and drama than anyone else who had written for the show. Amy did better with the drama, and microscopically better on anything regarding mother-daughter relationships, while Daniel went for more comedy zingers. Unfortunately for them, the wheels began to fall off the wagon a year and a half before they left. This column is about what they did right and what they did wrong.

Together, they had created a show that centers on two main themes. The first and most palpable theme in The Gilmore Girls is the mother-daughter relationship, as portrayed through: controlling Emily and her daughter Lorelai (who got pregnant at 16, had a child, and ran away from home); Lorelai and her daughter Rory (the dream-relationship between mother and daughter); Emily and her own mother-in-law, who does to Emily what Emily does to Lorelai; Lane, Rory’s teenage friend, and her mother Mrs. Kim (who does her best to control every aspect of her daughter’s life); Mrs. Kim and her mother (who did her best to control her daughter’s life).

At the same time, The Gilmore Girls is also about the false virtues of quaintness. Stars Hollow, the quaint Connecticut town, seems all sweetness and light at first glance. But everything that seems sweet at first sight stops being so upon closer examination.

One town event had an original barbershop band come to sing all the way from New York. Their song, Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer, provided a good backdrop to the event. The problem was that it was the only song they knew, and they sang it for hours. And that song sticks in your head. As Lorelai said, “I figured out how to get the Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer out of our heads. You have to sing the Small World song over and over again for the next 48 hours.”

Another time, the town rebuilt the church’s bells to commemorate the passing of a beloved townsman. At first, when the bells rang, everything stopped, and everyone looked at the church in reverence. However, as quaint as they were, when bells ring every half hour, it is bound to eventually drive the town insane.

The parties, the banners, the balloons, the bands, the events, the costumes – everything grows old and perhaps wasn’t that nice to begin with. And The Gilmore Girls was all about that, too.

This perfect, old-fashioned little town has as many oddballs as there are people living in it. A quick recap of the unforgettable characters the Palladinos have left behind:

First and foremost, the ultra-bizarre Kirk (once, after asking Lorelai out, he left, saying, “By the way, I think you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen... Outside of a, you know, really filthy magazine.”);

Then there’s the intransigent Korean Mrs. Kim (when showing a door knocker in her antique store: “Good price, seeing as how it may have belonged to James Madison. It was commonly known that James Madison liked big knockers.”);

The insufferable snob, Michel (to whom one day Lorelai actually had to say, “Stop comparing your dogs to my kid”);

The highly libidinous Miss Patty (observe how she hit on Rory’s father the first time she saw him: “You know, Christopher, we’re all like Rory’s parents around here, and I’m one of her mothers. And since you’re her father, that would make us... a couple.”);

The anal-retentive, bureaucracy-loving Taylor (“Wait till you see the banner I ordered. It’s going to make every other banner we’ve ever had look downright embarrassing.”);

Babette the busy-body (Sally Struthers does a magnificent Archie Bunker as Babette. Once she tried to decide who she likes more, Kirk or cats: “I love cats, but I love Kirk, too. It’s pretty much fifty-fifty, and that’s a high compliment, my friend.”);

The tough old broad, Lorelai the First, Richard’s mother (“Gilmores don’t have headaches. Our heads are perfect.”);

Sookie and Jackson who are able to fight about vegetables like nobody’s business;

And last and best: Paris Geller, whose personality, like Kirk’s, is a bottomless well of appalling, comic surprises (suffice it to say that she is capable of shouting at strangers: “You have no right to be repulsed by my sex life!” and talks politics in her sleep, as she tosses and turns: “Woodward... Bernstein... I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski”).

Although the humor was great, the thing that made their writing good was actually the drama. A few key moments come to mind:

Lorelai and her mother waiting for sixteen-year-old Rory who went out with Dean and didn’t get home all night. Lorelai defends Rory, practically in tears, while Emily says Rory is doing to Lorelai what Lorelai did to Emily. But once Emily is gone and Rory returns, Lorelai lashes out at Rory the way Emily does.

Another time, Lorelai spends the night with Chris, Rory’s father. The two are deathly attracted to each other, but the timing has never been right. Years ago, Chris was ready to marry Lorelai, his pregnant teenage girlfriend, but Lorelai wasn’t; then Lorelai had settled down, and Chris continued to be a bad, irresponsible boy. Now the timing seems right and they are starting to imagine a future together. But after a phone call, Chris has to tell Lorelai that the girlfriend that had left him is now pregnant. He has to go back to her and raise the child the way he didn’t raise Rory. (Later on, Luke will comment on this, “It’s tough when the universe is against you. It’s like taking on the Manhattan garbage union.”)

In another episode, months later, Chris storms in, demanding that Lorelai, who had shut him out of her life, talk to him. She just can’t deal with him, and since he doesn’t go away, she just stands there and takes it, trying to make him understand.

With Rory off to college and Lorelai busy with the building of her new inn, the two haven’t been able to even speak for each other for a week. Both their worlds collapse and both women melt down. Rory finds comfort in Dean, her married ex-boyfriend, and Lorelai melts down on Luke’s big chest.

And then there was the time Rory lost her virginity to Dean, her still-married ex-boyfriend. He was always in love with her, and she knew it. Wanting to get him back, forgetting herself in the moment, she sleeps with him. But when Lorelai finds the two together, Rory’s ‘perfect moment’ is ruined, as Lorelai points out that Dean is still married, that he hasn’t left his wife, and that Dean is not “her Dean” at all.

In their last year and a half, though, the Palladinos have pushed the overall plot of the series to a place that may sound good in planning, but makes absolutely no sense.

The first illogical plot: To fit a cliffhanger and a plot-point Rory suddenly abandoned her mother, left the college she’d dreamt of, and went to live with her grandparents. It was fast, illogical, out-of-character, and led to half a season of good writers trying to justify situations that made no sense for the characters. And once Rory came back, it was as if it had never been.

The second illogical plot came after Lorelai’s huge blow-out with Emily. Emily had gone one step too far, breaking up Luke and Lorelai, causing Lorelai to finally be free of the manipulation of her mother. This was the logical peak of everything that had come before in the series. However, the writers brought the two of them back, and now they were stuck with a relationship that can go nowhere, because it had already peaked and ended with a dud.

There was a way to bring back Emily and Lorelai. But it was the real way, the way it would have happened in real life, which meant that Lorelai would continue to be free of Emily and that their relationship would develop on honesty and not control. They chose not to do that.

Once you take your characters to a place they can’t actually go, once you work hard at trying to justify scenes that will take you to Impossible-Land, other things that don’t make sense start cropping up as well and the wheels fall off the wagon. It’s like a domino train, because it is impossible to keep the lack of logic to one place. The writers lose control and don’t know why. In The Gilmore Girls plot-lines suddenly appeared that were all about delayed confrontations and had characters keeping secrets for many episodes. That was new to The Gilmore Girls.

That is the reason talented writers and directors in Hollywood look so bad so often, while not being able to put the finger on the cause. A talented writer writes a professional plot and professional dialogue in a professional way. He looks back, and does not understand why it doesn’t work. The mistake was made in agreeing to write a plot that was under certain constraint of illogic. Everything the writer writes after that is part of the domino chain. In the same way, everything a good director directs after that is also part of the domino chain. The Palladinos made two big mistakes, two bad choices, and the wheels came off the wagon.

Let us hope they take a year or so off and then come back with a new series, unbound by old constraints.