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.
The show, now in its ninth season, remains a solid hit for ABC and has inspired spinoffs 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.