The first emergency in the most recent episode of “9-1-1” begins, as so many do, with a mystery. What calamity will summon the firefighters and medics of Station 118 to the scene? Will it be the new girlfriend at this tense family reunion, quietly choking on her potato salad as a round of tug-of-war distracts the other guests? Maybe the violently dislodged potato chunk will put out someone’s eye? A stroke, perhaps, during the increasingly intense game? No, no, nothing as humdrum as all that.
Instead, the rope slices the fingers off all the players, replete with fountains of blood, and the first responders arrive to find severed digits scattered throughout the picnic area.
If you’re looking for an explanation beyond the tearful “The rope tore their fingers off!” call to the show’s emergency dispatcher, perhaps “9-1-1” is not for you.
But if, like me, you find yourself guffawing over the scenario’s sheer ridiculousness, delighted by the fact that, yet again, the show managed to surprise you, then welcome. Truly, no one is doing it quite like “9-1-1,” the campy first responder drama starring Angela Bassett, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Kenneth Choi, which returns Thursday on ABC after a midseason hiatus. The show, now in its ninth season, remains a solid hit for the network and has inspired spin-offs like “9-1-1 Lonestar,” which aired for five seasons on Fox, and “9-1-1 Nashville,” which debuted this fall on ABC.
Longtime showrunner Tim Minear co-created the series alongside the ever-prolific TV powerhouses Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. Murphy found himself actually calling 911, “and that just got him thinking,” Minear says. Set in Los Angeles, the show includes a 911 dispatch center and Bassett’s police sergeant, who often responds to calls, but its main focus is the firefighters and medics of Station 118.
“The fun of this show has always been, as a writer, that we can kind of do anything. You can do a Lifetime Movie of the Week where Jennifer Love Hewitt’s been abducted by her abusive husband,” Minear says. (Hewitt has been kidnapped twice so far in the show’s run, but — let me tell you — every time feels like the first.) “You can do ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ with a bank heist.”
Minear, who previously worked on genre shows such as “Firefly,” “Angel” and “The X-Files,” approaches “9-1-1” similarly. “To me, it’s no different than the vampire detectives or the space cowboys,” he says. “Comedy with fantastical elements, heroes and sometimes death.”
The series has a knack for quickly humanizing the victims who briefly, dramatically cross paths with its regulars. The economical character work sets the stakes high for each of these interactions. These people find themselves in outlandish situations, yet the relationships feel lived in and grounded. There’s something satisfying about the MacGyver-esque ways that the team manages to emerge from each escapade, too.
The cast ably smooths some of the show’s more improbable edges. In addition to Bassett as Police Sgt. Athena Grant-Nash and Hewitt as dispatcher Maddie Han, the 118 is rounded out by Choi as newly minted captain Howard “Chimney” Han, Aisha Hinds as Henrietta “Hen” Wilson, Oliver Stark as Evan “Buck” Buckley, and Ryan Guzman as Edmundo “Eddie” Diaz. The characters themselves are endearing and often surprising. Take Buck, for example. He’s introduced in the pilot as a devil-may-care lothario, but over the course of the series becomes an anxiously attached, lovable baker perhaps overly obsessed with his best friend Eddie.
Minear says the show’s frenetic pace was inspired by the feeling of YouTube “montages of just people in crazy situations, bouncy houses blowing away and all that crazy stuff,” he says. “I wanted to give the audience the experience in the early days of going online and going down a rabbit hole of the world’s greatest fails.”
Sometimes life imitates “9-1-1.” The “beenado” (a tornado made up of killer bees) that bombards Los Angeles kicked off Season 8 and seemed far-fetched until millions of bees escaped from an overturned truck in Washington last spring. When another truck accident, this time in Mississippi, set free a slew of research monkeys this past fall and early reporting erroneously indicated that the primates were infected with herpes, most of my thoughts revolved around how “9-1-1” would handle the scenario.
But don’t expect to see herpes monkeys on the show. “We were all like, ‘Oh, we should do that,’” Minear says. “But it’s impossible. You’d need to CGI the monkeys.” While the show occasionally uses computer-generated images, it mostly employs practical effects.
Over time, though, spectacle has given way to character-driven stories about the leads. The 118 has a real found-family vibe, and it can be just as fun to watch them muck around the firehouse as it is to see them out responding to every variety of emergency.
The opening crisis, a standing feature of the show, now requires a kind of one-upmanship of Los Angeles horrors. It began with Season 2’s earthquake, followed by a tsunami (my favorite), a mudslide, a blackout, a blimp crash, a cruise ship disaster and the aforementioned beenado, which results in Bassett’s character having to land a passenger plane on the L.A. freeway. In Season 9, a humpback whale briefly swallows a billionaire played by Mark Consuelos, which leads Hinds’s and Bassett’s characters to go on a Blue Origin-inspired (yet far more disastrous) trip to space.
Minear used to have the Twitter handle @CancelledAgain, a nod to the many times his shows had gotten the ax, but he now faces an entirely different conundrum. How do you keep a show fresh and financially viable nearly a decade in? It’s this dual mandate that led to Minear’s most controversial decision: killing off Fire Capt. Bobby Nash, played by Peter Krause, in Season 8.
“I really felt creatively the show needed something to kind of shake it up, and the reason Bobby died was because, if I was going to do this, I wanted it to be a character that would affect all the characters’ stories,” he says. There was a more practical consideration, too — money. “You’ll see this across the board on network shows, where they start culling the cast and culling the production and trying to make things more affordable so you can keep making the show.”
“I have tons of regret about it,” Minear says. “I still think it was the right move. But it’s been really wrenching for me.”
Over the years, the dynamic between firefighter pals Buck and Eddie has become one of the most discussed aspects of “9-1-1.” Their relationship is intimate, and they’re often paired off in the same way the show’s established couples are. It doesn’t hurt that actors Guzman and Stark have undeniable chemistry. Fan fiction depicting “Buddie” as a romantic couple has been among the most popular on the website Archive of Our Own for years.
Minear gets a little cagey about the topic, well aware his words will be dissected by fans hungry for clues about whether the duo will officially get together, especially after Buck discovered and began exploring his bisexuality in Season 7. (Full disclosure: I think they should — these characters are clearly in love with each other!)
“It is a very difficult subject because I love the Buddie fans, and I am one of them,” Minear says. But he’s making a procedural about first responders, and romance will never be its central focus. “It’s different than ‘Heated Rivalry,’ where that is the show — the show is about those two guys getting together. That’s not what this show is,” Minear says. “This will probably piss off people, but whatever, this is what I think. I think the possibility of [Buddie] is what’s exciting.” Still, he’s not ruling it out.
Minear isn’t the kind of showrunner who plots out the entire series in advance, so it seems he genuinely doesn’t quite know if Buck and Eddie will end up together — or even how the rest of the season will pan out. But if you’re going to build the plane while you’re flying it, it’s probably best to have someone with the gravitas of Bassett’s Sgt. Grant-Nash at the controls.
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