Perhaps you've seen Mike Lombardi teasing viewers on an ad for the current season of the New York Fire Department dramedy Rescue Me airing on FX. In it, Lombardi hints that his character, novice firefighter Mike "Probie" Silletti will be "exploring new territory" this season.

Three episodes into the season, viewers learned what Lombardi referred to in an episode entitled “Torture”. After a hard day at work, Probie came home, cracked a beer, settled on the couch to watch sports--and much to the delight of gay viewers--cuddled with his hunky male roommate.

It was a moment so charged with possibility that gasps must have echoed across America--not a few of them coming from gay men who suddenly had reason to hope that mainstream TV would get a clue about how to portray the complex, sometimes conflicted, emotional lives of gay men. The fact that Probie is a fireman only made the storyline seem that much more promising.

Gay storylines aren't new to Rescue Me, now in its third season. Earlier developments included Tommy (Denis Leary), the show's central character, discovering that his daughter was a lesbian--and Tommy's being fine with it. The fire chief has a gay son who has appeared in several episodes.

And back near the start of Season One, in an episode called "Gay," it was Probie who explained to the guys in the firehouse what a metrosexual is. In that same episode, Tommy speculated that same-sex relationships between men would work well because they would be all about "blowjobs and ball games."

Regrettably, the episode following the revelation of Probie's new relationship spent precious little time exploring it. The two meager scenes devoted to the storyline consisted of a reference to Tommy's "blowjobs and ballgames" crack by strongly implying that Probie received oral attention from his handsome friend while, yes, watching a ballgame. That was followed by a puerile argument between the two men about who was "more gay," with Probie insisting that he wasn't gay at all because he was on the receiving end of things.

The argument ended in a wrestling match that might, in more clever hands, have become a testament to passion denied, but instead was staged like an afterthought by nervous straight writers looking for a quick way to turn it all into one more joke. By contrast, the same episode saw Tommy commit an act of marital rape handled with much the same mixture of frat-boy aggression and narrative ham-handedness: she actually got into it.

The desperate and denied passion that should have been credited to Probie and friend was, thus grievously misdirected into a more acceptable, but less honorable and less realistic, heterosexual framework.

Those who tuned in to this week's episode (“Chlamydia") were treated to one scene of Probie at home with the hunky roommate. Unfortunately, that scene was even more cursory (and sillier) than the previous episode's two paltry scenes.

The scene simply depicts Probie and his roommate screaming "Faggot!" at each other and winding up for a fistfight. Then, abruptly, a great play on a televised baseball game sends the two of them into paroxysms of boyish glee. As the scene ends, they are about to open a couple of bottles of beer, and, we may surmise from sheer Pavlovian repetition, get Probie's zipper open, too.

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