9-1-1 ★★★
As a rule, you know what you’re going to get with a US procedural show, whether it’s NCIS, CSI, SVU, FBI or one of their many offshoots. There will be a crisis, our heroes will race against time to save the victims and/or catch the culprits, while periodically checking in on each other’s personal relationships and celebrating the power of friendship.
If you’ve watched the odd episode of 9-1-1, you might have thought it’s the same old story. A burning building. A train wreck. A hostage situation. The first responders of 9-1-1 are always on the scene to save the day. But, as the double-episode premiere of its ninth season demonstrates, this is a show that is not satisfied with the status quo. The first shot of this new season sends us into outer space.
Flashing back from the astro-opening, on Earth the firefighters are getting over the death of Bobby (Peter Krause), whose demise robbed the city of a damn fine fireman, and critically lowered the average acting talent of the show.
Also grieving is his widow Athena (Angela Bassett, seriously slumming it here). But we’ve no time to wallow in emotion – or rather, we’ve got plenty of time because 9-1-1 chews up an amazing number of screen minutes with incredibly dull conversations.
Athena tells paramedic Hen (Aisha Hinds) how much she misses Bobby. Athena’s children tell Athena she’s a bad mother. Athena’s children tell each other she’s a bad mother. Firemen “Chimney” and Eddie tell each other how much they miss Bobby. Hen tells her wife she’s going to space … Oh yeah, back to that.
Why is a paramedic going to space? Well, it’s the usual story: a billionaire got swallowed by a whale in the middle of a Zoom meeting with his board, the 9-1-1ers saved him, and because Hen gave him CPR, he wants to reward her while also staging a publicity stunt to rescue his cratering stock price.
So Hen goes to space – and she takes Athena because going to space is a good way to get over a dead husband.
Let me remind you at this point that yes, this is a real show. This is an actual show using the actual phrase “space weather” to explain why a bunch of satellites are crashing into each other and putting Hen and Athena’s capsule in peril, not to mention causing fiery debris to rain down on Earth and force Chimney’s firefighters to battle a killer robot in a hospital.
9-1-1 is as utterly, idiotically mental as television gets – and, as the many memes it’s spawned attest, it is glorious to watch.
The only weakness is that it just keeps cutting back to those talky scenes when it tries to be a serious human drama. The attempts at depth frequently come off even goofier than the whale-interior and zero-gravity CPR scenes. When Athena finds a woman so near death that the only way to save her is to hallucinate a montage to Mad World, for instance, there is a sense of awe that sets in: a humbling admiration for the people who were willing to see this astonishing mash-up of soap opera, cut-price sci-fi, Mission Impossible fan fiction and never-ending blizzard of cliche through to completion.
Plus Jennifer Love Hewitt is there. Just incredible stuff.
9-1-1 returns 8.30pm January 26 on Seven and 7Plus.
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