9-1-1 at TCA: Live-Blog

With 9-1-1 set to make its ABC debut on Thursday, March 14, the cast and showrunner are participating in a panel for the Television Critics Association.

Follow along for our live-blog (kicking off at approximately 7:45 PM PT), as stars Angela Bassett, Peter Krause, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Oliver Stark, Aisha Hinds, Kenneth Choi and Ryan Guzman, plus showrunner Tim Minear talk about the series…

7:44 PM PT: ABC is so excited about the show is moving over…exec Karey Burke promises we’re about to be “barraged” with trailers and promos about the new season. “The action gets bigger and the story gets bolder,” Burke says.

7:46 PM: “I think it’s better—Fox was great for us for many years,” Minear says. But he points out that on ABC it feels like it’s the first year of the show in many ways. “They already loved the show. I just think it’s a shot in the arm for all of us.”

“It feels a lot the same,” Bassett says. She marvels at them reaching season 7. “We just cracked the seal on episode 100,” Krause adds.

7:49 PM: “Perseverance and continuing to love each other and grow,” Krause says of the characters and actors’ growth.

“It’s surprising how some of it mimics your life or you listen to where the stories are going to go and you go, ‘Tim, do you have a bug in my house?'” adds Bassett.



7:50 PM: “Not one damn bit,” Bassett jokes when asked if the Oscar honor changed anything for her on set.

7:51 PM: After stop-starts with Buck’s healing process, “I think this season is truly this time a season of self-discovery for Buck,” Stark says. “I think he’s finding ways to break that cycle.”

7:52 PM: How does the cast/EP react when LA has bonkers weather? “Just getting B-roll,” Minear jokes. Will we get a hurriquake this season? He will only say “stay tuned.”

7:53 PM: “I think the hope when you get to work for a long time is you work for a long time” and also that the things you still make resonate, Hewitt says. She notes her daughter just turned ten and told her ’90s stuff is cool now. (Her daughter doesn’t think she’s cool, though, she jokes.)

7:54 PM: “It’s kind of a snake eating its own tail,” Minear says of 9-1-1 going viral, since they are often inspired by viral videos for their plots. In fact, “We’re recreating another one right now.”

7:55 PM: Minear credits Ryan Murphy with putting together this cast. He also remembers Murphy saying, “America wants to see Angela Bassett in a police uniform.” He wasn’t wrong, they note. Murphy helped get Krause and Choi for this show, as well.

“I want them to read the scenes and I want them to be excited,” Minear says. “If I stay excited, hopefully they stay excited because they won’t be getting crap.”

Before Stark got this role, his visa was coming to an end. He used his last bit of money to get a green card…and almost became a firefighter. “And then this came along, which was better.”



7:59 PM: “Working with him on this season and seeing how tall he is in real life is insane,” Guzman gushes of Gavin McHugh. “He is one of the brightest and most shiniest individuals that walks in a room.”

8:01 PM: “We’re bringing back a couple on the cruise ship you’ll recognize from a previous episode,” Minear says. Episode 100, which will be episode 4, however, he’s being coy about, only saying it’ll air before episode 101 and after episode 99.

“As long as it don’t take as long as this 100 took,” Bassett says about being willing to do 100 episodes more.

“I think it’s pretty cool we’re going to hit 100 and go past that,” Krause says, noting the show is also viewed by people in pieces n places like TikTok.

“There have been times of huge uncertainty in this industry and we’ve been shielded from it,” Stark says of having this steady job in the midst of COVID, the strikes, etc.

8:03 PM: “It is a complicated show to make,” Minear allows. “We just wanted to show up at ABC and put our worst foot forward and do a big disaster. We’re still putting the first episodes together. We have been doing this for 7 years, so we know what we’re doing.”

8:04 PM: “It’s going great,” Hewitt says of the wedding planning.

“We’re going to get freaking married,” Choi enthuses.

“They’ve been through too much, they deserve happiness,” Hewitt says.

“It’s going to go great,” Minear jokes sarcastically of the big day.



8:05 PM: “I thought I was getting killed off in the third episode,” Choi says of Chimney’s frequent injuries on the show.

8:06 PM: “Hen definitely goes through a series of challenges,” Hinds says. She says, “Hen has learned more and more to depend on her family and find confidence in being their support in areas they need support.” With Karen, they’re trying to expand their family, “and they’ll probably spend another season trying to land that plane.”

8:08 PM: “Ryan has,” Stark says instantly when they’re asked if they ever thought their characters weren’t going to survive a close-call. As it turns out, Minear forgot to call Guzman when Eddie got shot.

“Didn’t I respond, ‘You’re just too pretty to die’?” Minear asks. (Yes, he did.)

8:10 PM: Minear says taking out the Santa Monica Pier was more simple to produce than the cruise ship disaster—to try and do the cruise ship, anyone who wanted to let them use a ship needed to make sure it would put the liner in a good light. Basically, anything could go bad, but they had to show the ship survived it all. The producers were like, “Have you seen our show?!”

8:12 PM: “Recently you may have read there was a jet fighter that got lost,” Minear teases of the premiere. “We’re doing that in the premiere. And it’s pretty great.”

8:13 PM: “When I meet a lot of first responders, I get a lot of, ‘My wife loves the show,'” Stark says. He notes they normally say enough to prove they watch the show, too. For Hinds, she hears from Black first responders who are grateful for the representation.



8:15 PM: “Come on over,” Minear says to the fanbase about the change in networks.

“Thank you,” Hewitt says. “Please make the jump.”

“The fanbase of the show has been very passionate,” Stark says. “They’ve been very intense in a very loving way for many years.”

Minear notes this cruise adventure is a three-episode arc, but it’s also new-viewer friendly in case ABC viewers haven’t seen the show before.

8:18 PM: “It’s all the same to me,” Minear says of his eclectic history of writing. He says it’s a mix of all of his shows. “It can be a rom-com, it can be a soap, it can be satire, it can be heartbreaking melodrama. It can be all the things in the same episode. It can be a heist one week. It can be a woman in peril…the canvas is unlimited. I have these talented people to pull it off.”

RELATED:

• ABC Releases Teaser Trailers for 9-1-1, GREY’S ANATOMY, STATION 19, and More
• 9-1-1 Franchise: Fox Says its ‘Extremely Unlikely’ Crossovers Will Continue
• 9-1-1 Moves From Fox to ABC

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