Emergency TV that doesn’t seem to be so dire
Strange — what would Ryan Murphy want with Dick Wolf’s empire?
9- 1- 1, an engaging but surprisingly rote drama from hitmaker Murphy and co- creators Brad Falchuk and Tim Minear, premièred Wednesday night, and from its initial siren wail, it seems very much like one of Wolf ’s Chicago- based NBC dramas about first- responders, save for the Los Angeles location.
It’s different, maybe. The idea seems to be that these first- responders will work more frantic shifts — ludicrously f rantic, j udging from the pilot episode made available to critics, which includes a drowning teenager, a suicidal jumper, a baby flushed down a toilet, a python trying to kill its owner and so on. 9- 1- 1 seems to suggest the outcomes won’t always be happy or fully resolved. It becomes more interesting when failure is an option.
The show has an i mpressive cast: Friday Night Lights’ Connie Britton, who starred in the first season of Murphy and Falchuk’s American Horror Story, costars here as Abby Clark, a 911 dispatcher who is quickthinking and stout- hearted. She’ll let you have it if you tie up her emergency lines with a complaint about the drive- thru mixing up your fast- food order, but she’s definitely the smooth operator you’ll want in the mid- dle of, say, a home invasion. The only problem, as Abby tells us ( 9-1-1 is full of her voice-over narration; maybe it’s because she’s wearing a headset) is that she hardly ever gets to hear how everything turned out — the caller usually hangs up once help arrives.
Angela Bassett ( another American Horror Stor y alum) co- stars as Athena Grant, a police detective with an assignment portfolio broad enough to allow her to show up to just about any emergency call, just when her shrewd assessment of the situation is most needed.
Fi nall y t here’s Pe t e r Krause (Six Feet Under) who has segued nicely into an older and more complex role as Bobby Nash, the station chief at a firehouse where gallows humour is a preferred coping mechanism.
Hewing to its predecessors, 9- 1- 1 gives its main characters a standard ration of personal problems to cope with when their shifts are over: Athena’s husband ( Rockmund Dunbar) just came out of the closet. Abby’s mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Bobby is a recovering alcoholic who relies on fire- department regimen and weekly visits to the confessional booth to keep him on the straight and narrow.
Overall, it feels very much like a pilot episode from 10 or 15 seasons ago, and that’s a shame, because pilot episodes are something at which Murphy and his crew usually excel. A viewer keeps waiting for a real surprise to come along — as if 9-1-1 is really only the television equivalent of wrapping paper, and any minute another, completely provoca- tive show will jump out of the box with a bang.
It’s worth staying on the l i ne for another episode or two to wait and see. But so far, nothing about 9-1-1 seems all that dire.