The leaves have changed colour, the mornings are cool and getting cooler. That can only mean one thing – the new TV season is here!
Oh, and autumn.
Network TV, or what’s left of it, has kicked off its new season, not that anyone has noticed. Network TV (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) seems to be almost exclusively where old people who don’t want to pay for streaming services go to watch TV.
Since I am in that demographic, I thought that maybe there’s something there for me, a hidden gem just waiting to be discovered. I haven’t watched a network drama since House in 2012, so I thought I’d take a look at something new. So, I checked out one new show, Nashville 9-1-1, the latest creation from Ryan Murphy, who is responsible for roughly 80% of the content on all of television today. Here is my report.
The first episode begins with an outdoor concert by a country star named Kane Brown. The concert is going fine, but it does seem a little breezy. Sure enough, it gets very windy, the stage collapses, and a tornado – big enough to destroy the entire city – is seen in the background.
Before we get to the rescue, let’s meet our stars. The scene shifts back to two days before, and we’re at a rodeo (of course). There’s a father-son team of firefighters, Capt. Don Hart (still handsome Chris O’Donnell) and Ryan (handsome Michael Prevost), who also moonlight as rodeo cowboys. Also entering the scene, dressed in very non-rodeo attire of a shimmering white dress and high heels, is Don’s wife and Ryan’s mother, Blyth (Jessica Capshaw). Blyth, we learn later, is loaded.
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After the rodeo, we go to the centre of the series, a Nashville fire station that looks more like a high-end wine bar. At the station, we meet Taylor (Hailey Kilgore), an attractive black woman, who is playing guitar and singing into her phone. She wants to be a singer-songwriter, of course. This is Nashville, after all.
After some chitchat and brief introductions to some of the other fit and attractive firefighters, we switch to a bar, where an incredibly sculpted guy (handsome Hunter McVey) is stripping in firefighter gear under the name Capt. Smokeshow. When he sees a woman in a wheelchair being bullied, he goes over to give her a private lap dance. This does not go over well for Smokeshow’s boss, who tells him, in the first laugh-out-loud line of the show, “You’re not a human being, you’re a set of abs”.
Then we switch to a bachelorette party, where a group of drunken women are riding a party bike, basically a bar on wheels. Everyone is having fun, but one of the girls gets sick. The driver of the party bike gets out to help her, but the sick girl quickly recovers after farting and burping loudly. (Yes, audible farting is now acceptable TV fare.)
While the driver of the party bike is tending to the farting/burping girl, the bike begins to roll downhill, crashing into a car. Then a 9-1-1 call is displayed on the screen which says, in the show’s second LOL moment: ”Bachelorettes are bleeding all over Broadway”.
Luckily, Capt. Smokeshow, who is still wearing his firefighter costume, comes to the rescue. The real firefighters show up, and Cap. Don shares a long, fraught stare with the sculpted stripper. I thought this was going to be a gay storyline, but no! Don realizes that the incredibly handsome buff guy dressed as a firefighter (whose name is Blue, by the way) is his illegitimate son! This displeases his legitimate son, who appears to be upset that the brother he has never met is even more handsome than he is.
All of this happens in the first 15 minutes of the show. The next day, Blue shows up at the fire station. He is ready to become a firefighter, even though he admits he makes at least $180,000 a year as a stripper. Sure, why not.
Then we switch to a birthday party held in a public park. A little girl is given a staggering number of gifts: a VR headset, headphones, high-tech gifts worth thousands of dollars. But her aunt gives the child a kite. The kid is nonplussed; she doesn’t know what a kite is. Can you guess where this is going?
Just before the second commercial break, the little girl flies the kite and, displaying incredible core strength, holds onto the string as it lifts her off the ground, another LOL moment. This results in our second 911 call where the aunt says: “My niece is flying through the sky”.
The flying niece is shown flying into the air via the cheapest possible computer graphics. The perfectly composed woman at the emergency centre (Kimberly Williams-Paisley), immediately hooks up to the woman’s phone so she can get a visual, and coolly assesses the situation. She tells the distraught adults to hold a blanket to catch the girl. End of crisis.
Then we return to the story of Blue, who lives with his mother although he makes six-figures as a stripper. His mother is an embittered country songwriter, played by a smoking (and I mean, literally smoking) LeAnn Rimes. She’s still ticked off at Capt. Don for not supporting her and Blue, and seems to be hatching some sort of plan to get back at him, a development that will have to wait for another episode.
Then we finally get back to the stage collapse. The tornado, which appears to be the greatest tornado in history, is heading their way. The heroic firefighters race into action, all except Blue who, since he is only a cadet, is assigned the task of giving people water.
All the firefighters, and the uninjured stage collapse victims, get together to lift the broken parts of the stage off the people stuck underneath. Blue gets to participate this time, because you don’t want to waste those muscles on giving out water bottles. Dramatic, inspiring music swells as everyone is saved.
But wait, there’s more! A technician who is at the top of the stage is hanging on for dear life. The two handsome brothers climb up the top of the stage to save them, and then… the episode ends. It’s a cliffhanger! Stay tuned.
Nashville 9-1-1 is entertaining, in a jaw-droppingly awful kind of way. I get the appeal; turn off your brain and watch ridiculously handsome people doing ridiculously heroic things.
But I started thinking, is the original 9-1-1 as stupid as Nashville 9-1-1? Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out the first episode of the new season of 9-1-1. In this episode, an obnoxious billionaire is conducting a Zoom call with his angry board of directors. The jerk billionaire is out kayaking while conducting the call. The call is interrupted, however, when the jerk billionaire is … swallowed by a whale. Yep, swallowed by a whale.
Spoiler alert! The 9-1-1 crew saves him by mocking up a rig that makes extra loud noise in the water, that somehow causes the whale to cough up the still alive and well jerk billionaire. He is so grateful for his rescue that he vows to send a crew member into space. But for that, we will have to wait until next week.
Well, you will. I’ll pass.
Nashville 9-1-1 airs Thursdays at 9/8C on CTV and ABC and streams on Disney+ and Crave.
