"Rescue Me" is back with its blend of rage, remorse, heroics, horror, pain and despair and (really) comedy.

Many people seem to agree that it's a great show. They just don't agree on why.

"One thing I hear is how real it is," says Andrea Roth, who co-stars as Janet Gavin. "I'm like, 'What world do you live in?' "

Many real worlds, one assumes, don't have this much going on.

Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) is a New York City firefighter. He has frequent chats with his cousin Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey), who died on the job on Sept. 11. He also had an affair with Sheila Keefe (Callie Thorne), Jimmy's widow.

He drinks, smokes, cheats. He's heroic at work and destructive at home. Still, he almost mended his relationship with his wife, Janet.

That's Roth's role. "We were on our way to possibly putting things back together," she says. "I was taking 'happy pills' to do it."

A drunken driver killed their son while he was with his dad. Soon, Tommy led revenge plans. His Uncle Teddy (Lenny Clarke) killed the driver.

That's where the new season starts — Teddy in jail, Tommy in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Janet in bed with someone close to Tommy.

This is not everyone's kind of reality. "It's dark and disturbing," Roth says.

And it adds bursts of humor. "That really threw me off at first because it was so funny," she says.

Leary is a stand-up comic who first drew attention on MTV's "Remote Control" in 1987 and still does Comedy Central specials.

Executive producer and co-creator Peter Tolan has had eight Emmy nominations for comedy scripts and two wins — for "Murphy Brown" and "The Larry Sanders Show." He also wrote the comedy movie hits "Analyze This" and "Analyze That."

These two comedy guys picked a deeply tragic subject. "The heavier stuff is, the richer the laughs are going to be," Leary said when the show first aired in 2004.

There's more to it than that, however. Leary comes from an extended, Irish Catholic family of Massachusetts cops and firemen. He easily related to the New York tragedies.

That set the tone for the show's gritty drama and humor. "We were originally going to do this as Noel Coward (sophistication)," Tolan dead-panned, "but ultimately we felt that the evening wear would get too dirty during the fires."

Leary puts humor and humanity at Tommy's core. "You still like him, despite all the crazy, egomaniacal things he does," Roth says.

And his estranged wife adds to the problems. "She's definitely flawed," Roth says. "That's what's so great about playing her."

This is a high-energy, high-emotion role, the opposite of her roots.

Roth, 38, is first-generation Canadian. Her parents are from Holland and Scotland, and she grew up in Woodstock, an Ontario city of 32,000.

This is the world she retreats to between jobs. "Right now I'm in the country with my dogs with a river in the background,"Roth says by phone. "My biggest problem is that one of my ducks died."

That's the pace she's accustomed to. Roth recalls the first time she dated a guy from New York. "He was my first American boyfriend, and there was so much yelling."

Canada was a great training ground because fantasy shows were filmed there for international distribution. Roth did them all — "Outer Limits," "Friday the 13th," "Highlander," "Forever Knight," and more. She was even a deadly android named NeuroBrain in the "Robocop" series.

She was ready for anything in U.S. roles. One of the richest was in FX's "Lucky" as Amy, a gorgeous con woman who fascinated and tricked the show's hero.

Now comes another FX role. I love it," Roth says. "You're doing interesting work with great people."

With a big cast and a 13-show season, she has lots of time off. She can fly from one sort of reality, with its rage and pain, to another, with its ducks and dogs.