‘9-1-1’ sequel responds to ‘Star’ power
Fox’s “9-1-1”first-responder footprint widens Sunday with “9-1-1: Lone Star,” a spinoff set deep in the heart of Austin, Texas. ❚ The shift is more than just geographic for Ryan Murphy-produced “Lone Star” (premieres Sunday after the NFC Championship game, approximately 10 EST/7 PST, then moves to Mondays at 8 EST/PST). The new series follows Owen Strand (Rob Lowe), a New York firefighter who rebuilt a Manhattan fire company after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and now tries to do the same at an Austin unit decimated by a fertilizer plant explosion.
Bill Keveney
Strand, facing the kind of illness common to many 9/11 first responders, and his firefighter son, T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein), who has addiction troubles, both view Austin as the chance to start anew. (Most of the show is filmed in Los Angeles.)
“The first episode is very much a New York stranger in a strange land,” says Lowe, explaining the contrast to “9-1-1” is by design.
While viewers were flung into the action of a busy Los Angeles firehouse in “9-1-1,” the Austin station being reopened and rebuilt after tragedy in “Lone Star.” It takes its time before delivering the action.
Not counting the initial fertilizerplant explosion, the first emergency requiring a response comes more than halfway through the premiere.
“‘9-1-1’ was built from the incident and the spectacle. And we sort of found the characters as we went along,” says Tim Minear, who is an executive producer of both emergency-response shows. “‘Lone Star’ began as more of an origin concept based on this tragedy in Austin. It’s about the healing of that particular wound.”
In the process of rebuilding the
firehouse, Strand hires a talented and diverse firefighting team, including a Muslim woman from Miami (Natacha Karam) whose heroic exploits earn her a heroic YouTube fan base, a black transgender man (Brian Michael Smith) who bravely broke barriers in Chicago and a dedicated but underutilized rookie (Julian Works).
On a less harmonious front, the lone firefighter survivor of the explosion (Jim Parrack) wants to return to work but Strand doesn’t believe the man, angry and bitter, is ready. At one critical point in the premiere, “it’s those two guys squaring off across the table,” Minear says. “That’s really what the show is about.”
“Lone Star” features another potential flash point, a division of authority that’s likely to lead to clashes. In Texas, as opposed to California, the EMTs and paramedics are under a different chain of command from the firefighters. That means Strand must sometimes give way to the chief paramedic, the talented, headstrong Michelle Blake (Liv Tyler ).
Blake, obsessively searching for answers about a long-missing sister and frequently bailed out of trouble by a police-officer friend (Rafael Silva), is the picture of complexity, Tyler says.
“She’s angry. She’s frustrated. She’s emotional. She’s a little bit nutty in a lot of ways in her personal life,” she says. “And then there’s the other side, which his her professionalism and (skill at) her work. I like that.”
Tyler likes the diverse world of “Lone Star,” crediting Murphy and his commitment to inclusion. (The TV megaproducer isn’t bad at attracting marquee talent, either, as the casting of Tyler and Lowe and Angela Bassett and Peter
Krause of “9-1-1” illustrates.)
“It’s amazing to have the platform to show people (from) different walks of life and see them in their professional world, who they are on the job and who they are at home,” she says.
With the original series set in politically blue California, Lowe says “there was the notion of putting a ‘9-1-1’ in a red state/blue state area where you could tell stories about people’s perceptions and misperceptions and have that be a different flavor in the ‘9-1-1’ universe.”
That contrast is on display in the second episode, Lowe says. “We start with a massive sequence where people are inexplicably hurling themselves off the top of a building at a high-tech firm. And it could just as easily be taking place in Silicon Valley. You can have that and drive your car five miles and have a traditional American Western (scene). That’s the beauty of Austin.”
Along those lines, “Lone Star” won’t have a tsunami, as “9-1-1” did this season, but it will feature a tornado and its consequences, executive producer Tim Minear says. “And, we have something you can only do in Texas. There’s a fire at a bull semen factory and the canisters that have the seed in them become mortars because the gas expands in the heat, so they’re being bombed by bull semen. You can’t go wrong there.”
As that description suggests, there’s an element of “random humor,” as Lowe puts it, to the series that’s also evident in his character, a firefighter with a deep interest, like the real-life Lowe, in men’s skincare.
But fans looking for a “9-1-1”-style action fix needn’t worry about the spinoff veering too far from the orignal, he says. “‘Lone Star’ has the same great (emergency) calls, the Oh my God, I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening television moments. I think if you like ‘9-1-1,’ you’re going to love this.”