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Last night FX aired the "Rescue Me" finale, which turned out not to be as bleak as I thought it might be.

Sure, one character died, but Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) lives on. But it almost didn't happen that way.

See what other endings producers considered after the jump. ...

Last month at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, "Rescue Me" executive producer Peter Tolan and series star Denis Leary talked about other endings they considered for the series.

"We always had rather grim prognostications for Tommy Gavin's end," Tolan said. "One was that he would actually, in the middle of a fire, just sort of sit down in the middle of a burning room in a chair, and that would be the end of a series, the idea that it was either a suicide or a heroic gesture, that his family would be taken care of after his death since he couldn't take care of them in life and that whole thing."

Tolan suggested FX president John Landgraf vetoed that finale.

"And then, when he met Maura's character ‑‑ Maura Tierney's character, she had a beach house. And we talked about one time him actually ‑‑ at the end of seemingly some very happy, like, settled‑down thing of him just going down to the ocean and stripping down and just going out to sea," Tolan said. "And then having you wonder if he's still going. Like, over the credits, you'd be going, "He's still going," and you would be left to wonder. That was not satisfying either. 

"But, ultimately, we came to realize that the idea of the show was, will a man who has survived this great tragedy actually survive it or not? And I think in the face of six seasons or whatever it's been -- seven seasons of television, you don't want to say no to that question," Tolan said. "You don't want to bring people along on a journey that long and then say, 'No, he's not going to survive.' It's just a very negative message. So we decided to, at that point, go with something a little more hopeful."

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