‘9-1-1’ Needs To Say Goodbye to Its Biggest Gimmick

Season 10 of 9-1-1 opens with a blast, literally, as a volcano erupts in downtown Los Angeles, forcing the crew at Station 118 to contend with lava flowing down its streets (and toward Angela Bassett‘s Athena, of course) and the catastrophic fallout left in its wake. It’s a disaster of epic proportions that has never been seen before… or at least not since 1997’s Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones. Yes, the series is going back, yet again, to some of Hollywood’s biggest and best — or decidedly mediocre, with Volcano rocking a middling 48% on Rotten Tomatoes — disaster flicks for inspiration. It’s a trend that is becoming increasingly tiresome, even gimmicky, every time they use it. And it has to stop.

‘9-1-1’ Is Rapidly Running Out of Disaster Flicks for Storylines

Season 1 of 9-1-1 kept things pretty grounded, while Season 2 began with a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, a riff on 1974’s Earthquake, was at least plausible. Season 3’s Santa Monica Tsunami storyline, a nod to 2009’s 2012 and 2015’s San Andreas, starts to go off the rails a bit, as does the Hollywood Hills Dam Break that kicks off Season 4, another nod to Earthquake and, likely, the 1976 made-for-TV disaster movie Flood! Season 5’s first two episodes covered a major blackout in L.A., another plausible scenario and one of the few that don’t have a direct movie reference unless you count 1996’s The Trigger Effect. The blimp disaster of Season 6 has echoes of 1977’s Black Sunday, and arguably even 1975’s The Hindenburg.

Then comes Season 7, where the series goes all-in with an unabashed storyline ripped off of 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure.

That directness made the arc a fun homage, especially for those that knew the reference, while rolling up plausibility and throwing it out the window (the closest a cruise ship came to capsizing in real life was in 1937, when the RMS Queen Mary came very close, an event that actually inspired the 1972 film). Season 8, however, didn’t just double-down, but triple-downed on the disaster movie inspiration, with L.A. under the threat of a killer bee “bee-nado” that brought together so-bad-they’re-good classics The Swarm (1978) and Sharknado (2013), and using the resultant chaos to morph into a takeoff — pun intended — of Airport 1975, where Athena has to take the controls of a jetliner after a small plane hits the cockpit.

The whole thing was batshit ridiculous and absolutely fun. But where the previous big-disaster events on the series felt more grounded and impactful, bringing out the best of its characters regardless of how inane the premise, the three-for-one felt more like a gimmick. And if Season 8’s events felt like a gimmick, the space storm arc of Season 9 solidified that certainty with a bizarre plot device that somehow got Athena and Hen (Aisha Hinds) into space for an Apollo 13-like disaster scenario (yours truly was prepared to cite it as a jump-the-shark moment, only for Bassett’s deft handling of Athena working through her grief saving it). Now we have Volcano, and after that, well, 9-1-1 is rapidly running out of source material, unless they turn to Armageddon or The Core, though Armageddon might be off the table since 9-1-1: Lone Star already had a meteor storyline.

It’s Time for ‘9-1-1’ To Turn Elsewhere for Inspiration

These storylines are not coincidental, with showrunner Tim Minear freely admitting that the season-opening emergencies are inspired by the golden age of disaster films, particularly those of the “Master of Disaster” Irwin Allen, saying, “Irwin Allen’s disaster movies are what I’m often referencing when I do these two-and three-part natural disasters. We joke that I’m the Irwin Allen of network TV.” He even sought, and was granted, the okay from the Allen Estate to use The Poseidon Adventure for Season 7.

But Allen’s career tanked with The Swarm, and his last disaster film, 1980’s When Time Ran Out, was critically savaged and currently holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. He had pretty much milked every last possible disaster scenario dry, which, as alluded to above, is the direction 9-1-1 is headed. It’s time for the series to find its inspiration for big events elsewhere before it becomes a caricature of itself, or come up with original scenarios that have the epic feel of such films without directly ripping them off.

Ironically, the path forward may just be with the one Irwin Allen disaster movie that hasn’t been fodder for the series: 1974’s Academy Award Best Picture nominee The Towering Inferno. The premise of a fire breaking out in a high-rise building is credible, grounded, and would really give the characters a chance to shine. Plus, as Collider makes the argument for, the film deserves a proper remake (and no, Skyscraper doesn’t count), and if that came across in a season-opening two-to-three episode arc on 9-1-1, the show would restore at least a degree of its credibility. Perhaps that which got blown out by the downtown L.A. volcano.