9-1-1’s Boss Talks About the Un-Bee-Lievable Season 8 Premiere, Especially Eddie’s Mustache
There’s a real reason behind Ryan Guzman’s fabulous new lip rug
For 9-1-1’s first season on ABC (and seventh overall), the executive producers of the series decided to pay homage to The Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen’s 1972 classic disaster film about the survivors of a capsized ocean liner. But when they went back to the drawing board for the eighth season of the hit procedural drama, 9-1-1 co-creators Tim Minear and Ryan Murphy wanted to up the ante by combining two more ’70s disaster films: The Swarm and Airport 1975.Yes, you read that right. On a show that has cycled through pretty much every natural disaster, 9-1-1 has now introduced the terrifying prospect of not only being stung and killed by killer bees, but also, in the case of protagonist Athena Grant-Nash (Angela Bassett), being stuck on a plane that collides with another aircraft.
Thursday’s season premiere finds Athena being forced to transport Dennis Jenkins, the man who killed her fiancé decades ago and whom she brought to justice in Season 3, back to Los Angeles on that ill-fated plane. Meanwhile, the rest of the 118 are all left to deal with a new normal at work. Following the rash resignation of Capt. Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), who is now forced to take a job as a consultant for a Hollywood firefighter show, Vincent Gerrard (Brian Thompson), the demanding and bigoted former captain of the 118, has officially taken back control of the fire station, where all the remaining firefighters except for Buck (Oliver Stark) seem to be falling into line.
On a quick break from writing the new season, Minear — the mastermind behind the 9-1-1 universe — opened up about how Athena’s brush with the past will affect her going forward, why he decided to bring back Gerrard at the end of last season, and the reason for Eddie’s (Ryan Guzman) new look this season. (Following Fox’s cancellation of 9-1-1: Lone Star, which just premiered its fifth and final season, Minear declined to comment about the rumors of another 9-1-1 spinoff in the works.)
What goals did you have in mind for the overall arcs of the characters this season?
Tim Minear: For me, what I really wanted to do was get the band back together because [at the end of] the short season, people are kind of pulled apart a little bit. Obviously, Bobby goes off on his little quest, and then Gerrard comes in at the end. So, my goal for the first movement of this season was to create a situation where everybody got to work together and then kind of redoubled their efforts to put the house back in order. Because I really feel like, while the audience likes to see all these big disasters and the conflicts, at the end of the day, you want to see the band back together, and you want to see them responding to calls. You want to see their personal lives, but you want to put them back into some kind of workable workplace situation where you have these variety of calls. Some make you cry, some make you laugh, some frighten you. So that’s my goal for the first movement of the season.
In the premiere, Athena has to come face-to-face again with her late fiancé Emmett’s killer, Dennis, who has negotiated an early release under mysterious circumstances. But now Athena and Dennis’ plane ends up on a collision course with another plane swarmed by bees. Why did you decide to go with this storyline, and how will the reintroduction of Emmett’s killer affect Athena going forward?
Minear: “Athena Begins” is one of the great episodes of the series, written by Kristen Reidel, and I think Athena had such a cathartic episode where she, after 30 years, finally found Emmett’s killer and had to think about Emmett again. I think she felt like, though it was grim in some ways to find this guy who’d been living a pretty good life after what had happened and delivering him to prison, I think her sense of justice required it, and she felt like that was a burden she had carried for so long. She’s finally solved that case, and now she’s escorting this [same] guy who has negotiated a deal for early release. So it’s a real conflict for her, and she’s going to have to learn how to balance the idea of redemption and forgiveness with justice, and how do you do that? So that really is the central conflict for Athena.
What I will say is that when I went into the season — and this is just from a practical nuts and bolts perspective — I wanted to do Airport ’75, which is not a great movie, but it’s certainly better than The Swarm. Ryan Murphy and I discussed it, and we decided maybe a mashup of The Swarm and Airport ’75 would be fun, so the question is, how do you mash those two things up? And what I decided to do was have literally the B-plot — the bzzz-plot — collide with Athena’s story, so the bee story actually does kick off the next disaster, which is the plane disaster.
So I put those two things together, and then just as a writer, you’re asking y
