I love Rescue Me so much. It's even better than last season [see below]. It just keeps on pushing the envelope in really exhilarating ways.

I'm a couple of episodes behind (I've been DVR'ing them), but last night I watched the one from two weeks ago in which the traditionally macho old fire chief, whose wife has Alzheimer's and who has just barely, grudgingly, begun to budge an inch off his homophobia and disappointed baseball-tossing dadhood to accept his gay son, overhears the son and his lover making love. And so do we.

What audacity! It's embarrassing to overhear anyone's fleshly intimacies, any time, ever. But here we are at the side of this profoundly conservative and conventional father, listening to his son whimper, "Oh yes! Give it to me hard, Daddy!", and we are brought right up against what liberal straight people accept gay love by not imagining: erotic equality, if you will.

The next morning the old chief greets son and lover with a stony silence. When his son figures out what's going on, he says, "We're in love, Dad! We express our love for each other just like anybody else." And then we find out what's really bothering the old man: he chokes out, "At least I thought you were the man."

Oh, and he also says, "Don't ever call me Daddy again." It is so wince-making.

But in the next episode, if the preview is to be believed, he'll be flipping burgers in an apron, hosting a festive gay barbecue.

That's Rescue Me. Daring, but, I daresay, not gratuitous. Oh, by the way, there's blasphemy too — Jesus Christ appears frequently to Tommy (Denis Leary), the show's barely-sober antihero, and he's stringy-haired and schmucky. (He roars off in his red sports car, which flaunts a bumper sticker: "Now you know what I'd drive.") Much more painful to see on brazen display is the selfishness of parents who put their own fantasies, pleasures, and addictions way ahead of their children. But this is a comedy-drama, so it goes right up to the edge of tragedy but never over. (After all, this is a world in which the worst — 9/11 — has already happened.) In the previous episode, a little girl overdosed on her addicted daddy's Vicodin, and there was a terrifying scene of domestic violence between Tommy and his girlfriend (who happens to be the widow of his best friend and cousin who died in the towers on 9/11). A week later, the little girl is fine, her dad may or may not be scared straight, and Tommy and Sheila are back to merely snarling obscenities at each other. Similarly, in earlier episodes, the fireman who'd been jilted by the fat girl, and bought a gun, did not stalk and shoot her. Instead, just in the nick of time, he met a very tall and avid veterinarian. And the old guy who tried to commit suicide in his garage only had an eighth of a tank in the car, so his attempt was a total failure, and now he has a thriving career in commercials.