

Weirdness exists on a spectrum, in many different kinds and degrees. For example, there’s “just walked into a room and everything looks normal but something seems off” weird, and “this lunch meat smells funny” weird, and “two giraffes riding around town in a convertible” weird, among others. “Weird” is truly one of our most versatile words. Take a few minutes to consider that. Not too long, please, because I need to show you screencaps of an occupied children’s bouncy house floating off into the California sky (coming soon, promise), but’s important that you really wrap your head around this flexibility in the language before we discuss Ryan Murphy’s new Fox first responder drama 9-1-1, because it is weird in at least two distinct ways. First, the fun one. Here is an incomplete list of things that have happened through the first three episodes of 9-1-1: – A woman flushed a baby down the toilet and a team of firefighters had to cut a pipe out of the wall and squirt a ton of lube into the pipe to slide the baby out, alive. – A sex-addicted fireman nicknamed Firehose decapitated a snake with an axe because the snake was strangling its owner, and then he went back to the owner’s building and used the fire truck’s fully extended ladder to meet her on the roof for passionate sex in broad daylight. – A violent burglar attempted to flee a crime scene on a motorcycle and Firehose blasted him off the bike with an actual firehouse. This one is my favorite. I could watch it forever. And I might, once I finish writing this post. – A man flew out of his seat during a ride on a rollercoaster and fell to his death because the bar holding him in the seat malfunctioned, possibly because of his heavyset friend’s girth.

– Firehose went to therapy for his sex addiction and ended up having sex with his therapist — played by Autumn Reeser, known by many as Taylor Townsend from The O.C. — before the first appointment was over.



– A divorced dad tried to buy his son’s affection by getting a bouncy house for a birthday party but the plan backfired when he joined his son inside and his adult body mass shook the restraints loose and the entire damn bouncy house floated off into the wind. I think a series of screencaps will help me drive home how wild this all was. Point being: This show is wild as hell. Especially when you consider that three of those things — the baby, the rollercoaster, and the bouncy house — happened during the cold opens of their respective episodes. That is how all of the episodes start. I have no idea if and/or how one can top “launching wealthy children into the sky inside an inflatable castle,” but the show has already been picked up for a second season, so at least they’ll have a lot of chances to try. We are all, to quote society’s modern-day philosophers, quite hashtag blessed. But this brings us to the second way 9-1-1 is weird. All of this crazy stuff — the dramatic rescues and goofy emergencies — makes up maybe 20 percent of each episode. The rest of the show — the vast majority of it, staggered in there between the wildest stuff you’ve ever seen on a television show — is a kind of boring and sappy straightforward network melodrama. The whole thing is kind of like someone up and crossed a B+ This Is Us about first responders with an A- version of Zoo that doesn’t involve lab-made hellbeasts attacking civilians, but could someday, who knows, you saw that firehose GIF. An example will help. Let’s try this: In the third episode, a main character found her daughter on the floor surrounded by pills, a clear suicide attempt caused in part by the revelation that her parents’ marriage is failing because her father recently came out of the closet. That’s some really heavy business. And it happened immediately after the thing with the bouncy house. I swear to God. With no commercial break. We rolled straight from a balloon emergency into attempted teen suicide and marital problems. The shift in tone is enough to give you whiplash and, no, we cannot rule out “person sustains serious injury caused by abrupt tonal shift on television show” as a future potential cold open.