Peter Tolan writes men who talk to avoid saying anything, then lets the truth cross their faces. It made The Larry Sanders Show and the first seasons of Rescue Me fine television; elsewhere he has done the one thing too long.
Fi1m perspective
The best room Peter Tolan has written is a firehouse kitchen. In Rescue Me (2004) the crew eat, argue and wait for the bell there, and John Scurti's Lou, a lieutenant who has taken up poetry since the towers came down, reads his verse aloud to men who cannot decide whether to laugh. We laughed. Then Scurti let something cross his face and we stopped, and that turn, from joke to grief and back before anyone could be caught at it, is what Tolan does when he is at his best. The talk is the cover; the point is what it is covering.
He came to that through comedy, and slowly. He trained at the Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis and worked in sketch and theatre in New York before writing for television in the early 1990s, on Home Improvement and Murphy Brown (1988). Then he joined The Larry Sanders Show (1992) as writer and producer, and something changed. "After I met him, I learned not to be so dependent on getting a certain amount of laughs per page," he has said of Garry Shandling. You can see it on screen: the backstage grievances make sense without any knowledge of television, because somebody wants respect, somebody wants reassurance and somebody would like to get on with the work.
The second phase belongs to Denis Leary. They co-created The Job (2001), which was well reviewed and did not last, and then Rescue Me, which ran seven seasons and gave Tolan the protagonist he keeps returning to: a man whose failings drive the story, here a New York firefighter who did not die on 11 September 2001. Tolan wrote and directed on it, and the fires he shot are short, dark and mostly smoke, because the series cares about the kitchen table an hour later rather than the burning room. For three seasons it is braver about grief than most films about that day.
The trouble is that Tolan finds a thing that works and keeps doing it. Rescue Me runs out of ways to break Tommy Gavin long before it ends, and by the later seasons we could set our watch by the collapses. His features are a mixed bag. Analyze This (1999), which paired Billy Crystal with Robert De Niro, is the one people remember; Just Like Heaven (2005) had a cooler reception; he has also written with Harold Ramis. Finding Amanda (2008), his directorial debut, is described as semi-autobiographical, which fits a writer who has always been more interested in the man at the table than in what happens when the bell goes.
Start with The Larry Sanders Show, which we would recommend to almost anyone, then the first three seasons of Rescue Me. Stop when you notice you know what Tommy is going to do next. He will still do it.
Biography
Peter Tolan is an American television producer, director and screenwriter. He was born on 5 July 1958 in Scituate, Massachusetts.
Tolan began his career writing for series including Home Improvement (1991) and Murphy Brown (1991–1993), for which he shared an Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1992. He wrote for and produced The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998), sharing an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 1998 for the finale episode.
In 2004 he co-created the FX series Rescue Me with Denis Leary, serving as writer, director, producer and teleplay writer across its run until 2011. His feature screenplay credits include Analyze This (1999), Bedazzled (2000) and Just Like Heaven (2005).
