Warning: Spoilers for 9-1-1 season eight.
When it comes to the stages of grief, I don’t see the 9-1-1 fandom moving past anger over Peter Krause’s untimely exit any time soon.
During last night’s episode of 9-1-1, fans watched the Fire Fam—for lack of a better word—scurry to find a cure for a fast-moving, deadly strain of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever that had infected firefighter Howard “Chimney” Han (Kenneth Choi) after a laboratory explosion. All the while, it was Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) we really had to worry about.
After Bobby’s own wife, police sergeant Athen Grant (Angela Bassett), painstakingly tracked down a single dose of the antiviral concocted by a megalomaniac scientist seeking a fast pass to a Nobel Prize, we learned the fire captain knowingly kept his own exposure a secret to save Chim and convince the government to free the other two firefighters trapped with them.
In what appears to be his final moments of martyrdom, Bobby proceeds to traumatize his pseudo-son Evan “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark) by sealing himself back into the lab and removing his mask, revealing his oxygen line had been compromised during the explosion. He then says goodbye to his wife, telling her, “This isn’t how I wanted to leave you. I’m not choosing to leave you.” (I didn’t really hear the rest because I was crying and refuse to watch it again. Sue me.)
It turns out that quote might as well have come from Peter Krause, who did not—as one might assume—choose to leave the long-running procedural, therefore forcing the show’s creator to choose between a soft exit and killing off a beloved character. Though Krause “completely understood” the storyline (you can read his actual message to fans here), creator Tim Minear told TV Line the decision was purely creative.
“After eight years it just felt like, if we have any hope of creating stories going forward that have actual stakes, then someone’s got to die,” Minear told the publication. Actually Mr. Minear, did you ever think that…you could just not? Maybe this one show exists so people have one night a week where real-life stakes just…cease to exist? That might sound silly, but maybe people keep watching your show because they don’t fear having the rug pulled out from underneath them.
Read moreWhen Did Prestige TV Get This Grim?
All I want right now are well-made, buzzy television shows that don’t make me fear for my life, plunge me into an anxiety spiral, or leave me feeling like I need to cleanse with yet another episode of Friends. Why is this so hard?
Minear’s reasoning just seems a bit rich considering viewers watched 9-1-1 operator Maddie Han (Jennifer Love Hewitt) console her presumably dying husband with a puffy scar on her neck from having her throat slashed by a serial killer just a few episodes prior. You know, the same husband who survived multiple stabbings of his own, not to mention having a rod of steel rebar lodged in his skull in season one.
It would take ages to go through all the unbelievable near-death experiences these characters have outlived, so you’ll forgive me for being pressed that Bobby died even though Chim took home the mouse with the cure in its blood. I don’t know if anyone remembers, but Bobby’s own blood was once used to cure pregnant women and their babies of rhesus disease. Just thought I’d remind ya!
Perhaps that very mouse is why so many 9-1-1 fans are still in the denial stage of grief…or maybe it’s the alleged script leak that convinced them Bobby will be buried alive during the funeral episode in two weeks’ time. But they were already wrong about Bobby’s leaked funeral footage being an April Fool’s joke or an elaborate cover-up, so I’m not giving the internet conspiracy theories much credence.
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While I’d be happy to be wrong, I’m skipping straight to anger over a choice that feels as real as it is unnecessary. With everything going on in the world, I just don’t have a single interest in watching Athena Grant move into the dream home she built with Bobby after losing her first love to a random act of gun violence. Or watching Chim blame himself for his captain’s death, as we see in the preview for the next episode. Or watching Buck grieve his father figure when the show had just started acknowledging his tension with best friend Eddie (Ryan Guzman)…
When it comes to 9-1-1, the interpersonal relationships between this diverse cast of characters is the heart of the show, and this fan did not sign up to see their favorite firefighters in pain that can’t be resolved in a few episodes. It may not be what the showrunner wants to hear, but this isn’t The Walking Dead. It’s not even Grey’s Anatomy, which set precedent for heartbreak by killing off Denny Duquette (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in season two.
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“We get it, they’re firefighters. They risk their lives. Understood,” one fan said in a TikTok video after watching the episode. “I’m here for a little pizzaz. A little close call. But at the end of the day, we want these characters to be okay. To go home to their families. To get that happy ending. If I wanted a show that would have emotionally destroyed me I would have went over to Shondaland.”
Just a few days ago, Glamour’s senior West Coast editor Jessica Radloff begged the question, “When Did Prestige TV Get This Grim?” It turns out, we can’t even switch over to network procedural television for a bit of levity as our country descends into chaos.
Regardless of all the blood and adrenaline, this particular show about first responders is, in fact, a comfort show—and jumping straight to killing the show’s patriarch is not the bold creative move Minear thinks it is. For fans like me, the question was never whether or not a member of the 118 could die on any given call. It’s not even about whether 9-1-1 can survive without Bobby Nash presiding over family dinners and extolling words of wisdom after a hard shift. The question is why the hell would it want to?
The post Can 9-1-1 Survive Without Peter Krause? It Shouldn’t Have To appeared first on Glamour.
