Old-school drama to the rescue on ‘9-1-1’
Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have made a point of wallowing in the weird and pushing the envelope with shows like “American Horror Story” and “Scream Queens,” but their latest creation for Fox is a real shocker: It’s an oldfashioned dramatic series about first responders in Los Angeles with stock characters and familiar story lines, evoking classic shows like “Adam-12” and “Emergency” and contemporary fare like Dick Wolf ’s “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago PD.”
“9-1-1,” premiering on Wednesday, Jan. 3, is remarkable mostly because it isn’t. But because Murphy and Falchuk created it, “9-1-1” is meaty and engaging. Connie Britton (“Nashville”) is a dedicated dispatcher — perhaps too dedicated, as she takes each emergency personally, and it’s taken a toll on her psyche.
On the cops’ side, we have tough Athena Grant (Angela
Bassett, “What’s Love Got to Do With It”), who is all too aware that emergencies can be matters of life and death and there’s no room for screw-offs like rookie Fire Department emergency crewman “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark, “Into the Badlands”). Buckley is the young, sex-obsessed pretty boy who thinks it’s fine to take the hook and ladder out for actual hookups in the middle of the workday. His supervisor, Bobby Nash (Peter Krause, “Six Feet Under”), has no patience for Buck’s behavior and threatens to fire him, but, of course, Stark is too photogenic to be booted from the cast. Besides, he’s one half of the stock situation of an older, wiser supervisor seeing a lot of his former self in the behavior of a younger, greener underling.
The pilot episode comprises several emergencies, all of which are written and directed as nailbiters. In between, we begin to learn a little about some of the main characters. Nothing that would distinguish them from other characters in similar procedurals, but even if “9-1-1” is a departure from racier MurphyFalchuk fare, it maintains high production values, solid performances and engaging scripts.