9-1-1 and the End of America
this is an unhinged essay about the effectiveness of 9-1-1 as cultural propaganda and what it indicates about our Current Reality
by Zoë Hayden
(This is a a long essay that nobody asked for about the 9-1-1 franchise as an institution, reflecting on its legacy and values as posited by the narrative. Assume it contains spoilers for any episode of 9-1-1 or 9-1-1: Lone Star aired prior to February 4, 2025.)
The blind spots
9-1-1 is America's cultural desperation. It is our capitalist heart and the harbinger of our doom.
On one hand, the 9-1-1 universe (consisting, so far, of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Lone Star) is an astounding achievement of interpersonal emotional clarity and authenticity shining through in chaotic and harrowing circumstances. In our intimate relationships, we can flourish with communication, openness, and vulnerability. The show frequently delivers mature meditations on things like honesty, loyalty, boundaries, and how to love.
At the macro level though, in its materialist politics, 9-1-1 is a monument to state power (cast with a passive, stabilizing quality that it has arguably never had in real life) and the overall necessity of capital to our lifestyles and our cultural heritage. The nature of capital in 9-1-1 is made evident by its conspicuousness and how rarely it is remarked upon. The rebukes the script provides against state power and capital are reduced to either grim sight gags or offhanded comments – jokes that feel pointed and are astonishingly well-executed but lack narrative thread to link them to the main stories that the show is telling. (For example – in Season 1, Episode 2 of 9-1-1: Lone Star, an environmental hazard causes people in a grating corporate startup meeting to start behaving like zombies and clawing their own skin off.)
The reason for this is simple: the main story is soap opera and interpersonal drama, against a procedural backdrop. That interpersonal drama is, somehow, only tangentially informed by material conditions. 9-1-1, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates Americans' breathtaking complacency while it grapples with the psychological fallout of modern life under western corporate capitalism. Everything on this show is chaotic, and mass death might be caused by somebody like a middle manager cutting corners – shirking a building code or regulatory practice, for example. But the set dressing, costuming, and narrative choices are effortlessly aspirational. No one on this show is ever worried about money. Everyone lives in a beautiful home or apartment that looks like a spread in Architectural Digest. The only people who are criminalized have wrought their own suffering. But the majority of suffering on the show is wrought by acts of God, by nature, by happenstance.
You see, no one is at the wheel. There are not institutional evils in 9-1-1. When they are depicted, they are not highlighted as such, and can be addressed by plucky, individual direct actions, like Liv Tyler's one-season Lone Star character, Michelle, providing a life-saving albuterol inhaler to an undocumented family or insulin treatments to an unhoused child with diabetes. (Lone Star, for all of its early-season awkwardness and grating flaws, like its refusal to film in Austin or occasional phoned-in fake Texas accents, often threatens to break containment and directly acknowledge the horrors of the real world as they might affect an actual person – something that the show's original recipe seemingly cannot do.)
For both shows, there is a visceral tenderness there, in the rubble of all of these suddenly perilous circumstances. The viewer is constantly watching new connections blossom between characters, watching them come to love each other, watching their love change and deepen. The acting can be extremely good, better sometimes than you'd expect the material to warrant, and much attention is given to power dynamics between characters. (I am thinking specifically of how much the early seasons of 9-1-1 gave high-drama, romantic, character-driven arcs to actors like Aisha Hinds and Kenneth Choi, or Lone Star's ability to deeply flesh out characters like Marjan Marwani and Paul Strickland despite their extremely limtied screen time thanks to Rob Lowe and how much we are mandated to discuss his love life and also September 11th.) Problems in these shows are usually solved by authentic, honest conversations about insecurities and concerns and fears. Importantly, these conversations are often framed by cataclysm, both natural and human-made (but are humans not also part of nature?) The characters' personal growth is aided by the encroaching disasters around them.
A key example is original recipe's third season opening sonata (for each season of 9-1-1 is like a deranged symphony): a three-episode apocalyptic adventure where lab-designed beautiful sweet firefighter Buck must save his best friend's son, a nine-year-old with cerebral palsy, from a tsunami that takes out the Santa Monica pier. In the course of this journey, Buck learns about responsibility to himself and others, is almost supernaturally gorgeous and heroic the entire time, but the lessons take awhile to sink in due to other issues in his life – a neat trick which gives it a ring of authenticity to anyone who has ever dealt with trauma, and which doesn't even fight for space with the big-budget-disaster-movie bombast of it all.
The point I am trying to make is that the 9-1-1 cinematic universe has the distinct effect of trapping the better angels of our nature like butterflies in a jar, insulating their fragile beauty from the outside world in conditions that will still ultimately kill them. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, stupid as shit – and the latter thing is sometimes a good thing, because it allows us to enjoy moments of fantasy and farce and silliness. But it's also an element of its cultural propaganda that shouldn't be treated as merely incidental.
Network television has functioned in many ways throughout the years as a social barometer, because what is allowed on network TV, however titillating it tries to be, usually falls well within the bounds of what mainstream cultural norms are in American society and what might be appropriate for a family to watch together. So 9-1-1's cultural progressivism feels like a clear indication that we've reached a point in society where we can't put the horse back in the barn: everyone is kind of aware of structural racism! It's pretty clear at this point that we are so fucked because of climate change! Queer people exist and have families and are loved! Even, perhaps, trans people! (Perhaps.) You can have a diverse cast & crew on a TV show and it's really easy to do actually! It should be generally expected that men are capable of emotional intelligence and intimacy! Perhaps we should have regulations and norms for things like building safety and environmental hazards! Like, children know this stuff. Literal children.
So, where 9-1-1 lands is at an awkward moment in the seemingly doomed American experiment. Donald Trump has been re-elected, for some reason, and the America that the 9-1-1 universe depicts could arguably be perceived as a document of an interregnum. The original series debuted in January of 2018, when the first Trump administration had become more of a numbing, constant, background noise of terror, when the daily debasement had started to feel like a Kafkaesque sketch comedy scene that just would not end. Lone Star came around in January 2020 – just in time for COVID-19 and ahead of the 2020 election. The final episodes of Lone Star are airing in early 2025, sending the show out bookended by Trump presidencies and into a world that is somehow worse than we imagined back then. We are losing some really meaningful network TV representation in characters like Paul Strickland, Marjan Marwani, and Mateo Chavez – a proud Black trans man, a badass devout Muslim woman, and a Latino man with a precarious immigration status whose kindness, bravery, and devotion to his friends are unmatched.
The naked idealism of the show has not gone unnoticed by critics, and its spectrum of "well, you've gotta hand it to them" to "there was an attempt!!" responses to popular issues and cultural moments can be hit or miss at times. But the show is, first and foremost, never mean or unkind – and this is important, because you are a good person. And even the show at its most frustrating, at its most September 11th, at its most child endangerment, at its most perplexingly chaste or surprisingly horny, at its most Days of Our Lives, will still manage to deliver a plot beat or visual hit of serotonin that will fuck you up for 24-48 subsequent hours. Any member of the cast may tenderly rescue a baby or a dog or a cat or a slightly dysfunctional family at any moment. When these first responders arrive, they don't just save your life, they provide you with a magical opportunity to address unresolved personality defects and get in touch with the true meaning of life or family. They also might address a deep-seated personal conflict. They might reconcile with a parent, a former lover, a friend, a child, or their past self. Which, in its own small way, might help you do the same.
On cops
The 9-1-1 cinematic universe is a space that never asks you to take it too seriously, but presents itself with an earnestness and a focus on wholesome human kindness and understanding that leave you with no other choice. And a show this smart – which navigates matters of trust and love and accountability with such aplomb – must also be noted for what the writers did not include. The lack of structural awareness at the heart of 9-1-1 is a choice, and it's a choice that reverberates throughout the commentaries it does make quite deliberately (and sometimes even well) about a variety of serious topics, like racism, homophobia, transphobia, substance abuse, postpartum depression, sexual assault, domestic violence, PTSD, and American policing.
This is a show that frequently allows its law enforcement characters to shoot people unrepentantly, but will also force a Black father (Michael Grant) to have "the talk" with his Black son about how he needs to behave when he encounters a police officer – how the police will shoot him first and ask questions later simply because he is a Black boy. There is no translation done between this moment and the moment where that same Black boy's mother, noted cop Athena Grant, perp-walks another Black man to the insane needle drop of "Rise Up" by Andra Day. We are meant to see this as a big character moment for Athena, when she catches her dead fiance's killer from decades ago. The show asks the question about the conditions of Black incarceration and police violence against Black Americans, but does not wish to answer these questions except by course of platitudes and songs. (Sometimes, characters do in fact burst into song, which seems to solve problems as well.)
In the United States, we talk a lot about the "culture wars", and 9-1-1 feels like proof that in aesthetic and interpersonal ways, we have really have made some real representational progress. It's no longer considered widely acceptable to discriminate against people just because they are different from you. There are of course people who still want to do that and they never shut up about how badly they want to do it, but increasingly, mass media pop cultural content depicts these people as fucking clowns and losers, which they are. But structural inequity? Definitely don't worry about it – the goodness of your heart is enough and might be all we have left once we realize that any structural or institutional protection given to our humanity is not just conditional but really not far off from blatant racketeering.
And you can probably trust the police, according to 9-1-1, because Angela Bassett???? And Rafael Silva???????? They have cast two of the most charismatic actors on the planet in these roles as pigs on 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Lone Star, respectively. Angela Bassett, an established badass actress who also serves as executive producer of the original series, plays Sergeant Athena Grant as a tough, beautiful loner who would sooner chew off her own limbs than ask for help, but slowly opens up into a somehow even more self-possessed and confident woman with the help of her second husband, Bobby Nash, Captain and Dad of the LAFD's 118. Silva, in his first ever major role, plays an out, gay police officer in the Austin Police Department, exuding both raw swagger and vulnerability as he slowly emotionally rehabilitates TK Strand, a homosexual firefighter-turned-paramedic with a shit-eating grin and a heart of gold. Eventually, Silva's character Carlos Reyes gets storylines of his own, teasing out a nuanced relationship with his parents and doing unnecessary apologia for the Texas Rangers. Both Silva and Ronen Rubinstein, who plays TK, are openly queer actors, and they lend a lived-in realness to the characters as they navigate normal relationship issues, like work/life balance and discussing where they stand on having children.
It's of note, of course, that both of the main police characters in the franchise are portrayed by actors of color, because in the over-arching philosophy of 9-1-1, whiteness is not particularly of interest, and it is perhaps impossible in the 21st century to create emotionally resonant content on primetime broadcast television about white police officers. The erstwhile Brooklyn Nine-Nine, also originally by FOX, dealt with this much more directly, and as a comedy, had a little more leeway, but still couldn't quite make it land that Andy Samberg had any business being a cop or had anything of interest to say about policing. He was more a self-insert for the viewer, someone to whisper asides and quips about the all-encompassing and death-bringing American police state. There's a reason why 9-1-1 limits its focus on police characters. The longer you look at them, the further you will be pressed to remark upon their chosen profession, and in a character-driven drama, the depth of that requirement would press uncomfortably against the swim bladder of human kindness that is required to keep the show afloat.
The limited focus doesn't mean the show won't spend entire episodes focusing on why these characters became cops and why it's fine, actually, that they're cops, because they're following their hearts and callings and how dare you question that? They even make Carlos seriously question joining the Texas Rangers due to their history of racist violence against Chicano men, only for it to actually be a Diversity Win! that his father joined the Rangers and really made them less violently racist (the Austin Police Department, by the way, is somehow not racist).
Realistically, television copaganda is an art that goes back generations at this point, but rarely has it been so perfected as on 9-1-1, and that is because the world that 9-1-1 inhabits is a fantasy so rich: an American ideal where you are a good person. Not just that: an America where "trying to be a good person" might be a semblance of a politic in and of itself (which, of course, it isn't, though it is a very important starting point). The show is a comforting embrace, a persistent affirmation that where you are on your journey matters, that we are all striving to feel connected to each other, and that our kindness to each other can see us through the darkest possible circumstances.
The real soul of the franchise is its focus on firefighters and 911 dispatchers, and the copaganda's effectiveness is enhanced by its limitations here, because we see the police as an essential part of the fabric that keeps us safe, side-by-side with fire departments and 911 operators. And all of these beautiful idiots deserve to achieve self-actualization. Even the cops. Perhaps especially the cops, for they are the ones whose hearts most need saving – by being cops, but like, the right way.
On drama and reality: 9-1-1 in 2024-25
To look at the true nadir of 9-1-1's soul, we have to talk about the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. This is a show that continued production as long as possible during the unfolding disasters in LA, as crew members' homes burned to the ground. This is a show that has averted its gaze intentionally from the threats of climate change that most impact its cast, crew, and the real-world counterparts of its characters – a striking threefold materialist betrayal which would make sense if the narrative's values were less clear, if it were more Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, if the characters didn't actually seem to learn and grow, if they didn't constantly demonstrate healthy conflict resolution and relationship dynamics.
The disasters and set pieces on these shows are not always one-to-one metaphors, but they can be. They are always an opportunity for the writers to wink and beckon about the Themes. Buck is literally struck by lightning and has an It's A Wonderful Life dream where he never became a firefighter instead of having never been born. The dream teaches Buck the true meaning of loving yourself. 9-1-1: Lone Star gives you a plot with Rob Lowe (a.k.a. Captain "Owen Strand" of Austin Fire's 126) facing impotency issues in the bedroom, and packages it with a conflagration at a livestock insemination facility that causes enormous metal canisters of expensive bull semen to become projectile and launch into the air like weapons of a rebellion. It is extraordinarily beautiful that someone took the time to make this shit up. (Say what you will about the plot conflicts in Lone Star often being tied to Rob Lowe's dick, but somehow, the writers usually manage to bring it back around to something truly meaningful – about confidence, or parenthood, or intimacy, or honesty.)
But, perhaps unfortunately for 9-1-1 original recipe, the natural conclusion of emotional intelligence is, really, material intelligence. If you continue to develop in your sense of empathy, your sense of self, and your sense of love, it has to be hard to imagine a rational, ideal world where thousands of acres are burning in a towering inferno because of human-caused climate change and people are out here trying to produce a television show about firefighters while their houses burn to the ground, because of capitalism.
Someone, or a lot of someones, at some point in this process, perhaps in the 1800s when climate change due to carbon emissions was first identified, could have changed the trajectory of our human history. Failing that, someone could have simply stopped production on 9-1-1 during the wildfires (which they eventually did). Or, we could have constructed a society not dependent on the sale of our labor for our survival, so production assistants might not have had to be on set for any show or film while their homes were devoured by flames.
So: shockingly, a fictional show, created through a corporate medium and bound by the FCC censorship guidelines in the United States about broadcast television, has limitations. These limitations are part of what makes its artistic achievement and emotional honesty deeply interesting and, from my perspective, historically notable. There are so many restrictions that we have to operate with when making art, and making art under those restrictions is part of what makes it beautiful. The deeply woven threads of practical reality and artistic expression are inextricable from each other. When we experience art, part of that process can and should be thinking about the process that led to its creation and its material realities – and this material reality again exposes the tension between 9-1-1's best and worst instincts.
The positives are manifest. One of the great joys of 9-1-1 is its strong culture of mid-budget practical and digital effects. These are shows shot largely on built sets or outdoors. They present endless opportunities for SFX makeup artists to create gory injuries and illnesses; it's obvious when the fire is "real" versus added in post, but who cares? There isn't a lot of green screen in 9-1-1. The production constantly presents problems to solve for both their fictional firefighters and their effects departments and watching that parallel problem-solving anchors the show in a great tradition of spectacle and disaster movies and horror movies and even soap operas. The point I'm trying to make is that when it works, it works, even as momentary lapses into critical thought expose the fragile outer firmament of American liberalism and what it can do for the soul.
And when it doesn't work, it's still telling a story about something – which keeps me invested and hooked even as it disappoints me.
Let's talk about the show at its worst, which is unfortunately a timely story.
The front half of 9-1-1's season 8, the show's first full season on Disney's own ABC network, was maligned by fans for its choppy writing. It does get off to a strong start. A three-episode opening set piece features a series of events set off by a truckload of killer bees being released in downtown Los Angeles during a heat wave – famously, they called it "Bee-nado" and got a lot of mileage out of Eddie Diaz's mustache under a beekeeper hood in promo shots. The arc concludes in the most romantic possible gesture between Bobby and Athena, in which Athena is flying a runaway jetliner and Bobby, not even on duty as a fire captain anymore, deputizes himself to clear a freeway so she can land the plane with the assistance of an autistic child's hyperfixation. Peter Krause looks amazing here, standing in the path of an impossibly large plane in his short-sleeved uniform, embodying the term DILF with his whole soul. You buy it because it's Bobby and Athena and if you've watched the show, you've seen both of them at their lowest, picking each other back up, calling out each other's worst flaws with the intention of still loving each other anyway.
But the rest of season 8A goes off the deep end – probably because of the dual WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes compressing their writing/production timelines irreparably, and that, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Striking gets the goods. And in the final product, you can kind of see what they're trying to do. They broke up Buck and Tommy – our perfect lab-created firefighter sweetiepie and his hot, gay pilot boyfriend, after making Buck canonically bisexual in Season 7, episode 4, a special moment for all the queers out there but also the kids who grew up not feeling loved or, really, anyone who has learned that self-discovery is a never-ending process.
(I won't touch on the fandom wars here – if you know, you know – but Buck has pretty much always been written as bisexual, if you're paying attention. He just didn't realize it until Lou Ferrigno Jr. kissed him, and who among us would not immediately realize something about ourselves if Lou Ferrigno Jr. moved in for a kiss? All the sapphics and straight men would switch teams for him. If nothing else good comes of 9-1-1 original recipe, we should at least be able to cast Lou Ferrigno Jr. in a big budget gay romcom now. Like Anyone But You budget. Shooting in multiple countries. That sort of thing. But I digress, and will get back on topic as much as it pains me.)
The number one rule in a show like this is that no one's story can settle too long. It's like sealing marbles inside a puzzle box and shaking them around but then also throwing the puzzle box on the ground and smashing it with a hammer. So for Buck, he's not just getting dumped. His best friend Eddie is threatening to move back to Texas to be closer with his son, who he has become estranged from after having a weird emotional affair with a woman who resembles his dead mother (played by the same actress – remember when I said this show forayed into Days of Our Lives?). Buck was also close with his son, Christopher – not only did he rescue Chris from a tsunami, but he takes him to the zoo, plays video games with him, gives him serious talks about how it's important to be a classy player with girls in eighth grade. He also affirmed to Chris that it was okay for him to move in with his grandparents if it made him feel safer – something he and Eddie could agree on, though Eddie wasn't ready to say it.
Meanwhile, paramedic queen Hen Wilson has been on a journey of her own – their son almost died being crushed under a car while her wife Karen had to look on in Cowardly Lion makeup (seriously). They had their foster license taken away, forestalling the adoption of their second child, due to a corrupt and cartoonishly evil city councilwoman who tried to parlay being cartoonishly evil into running for Mayor of Los Angeles. Luckily, Hen exposed her during a public hearing – again, an individual action against institutional corruption (completed with the help of Captain Gerrard, a minor character previously only seen in flashbacks and a noted homophobe, racist, and misogynist who apparently needed a redemption arc).
God, and I haven't even touched on all the shit with Brad and the show-within-a-show, an embarrassingly schmaltzy firefighter drama called Hotshots which requires an actual current LAFD fire captain to be its technical consultant for some reason, but really when you think about it overall: Season 8A of 9-1-1 is a cry for help. It nakedly mocks its audience, the concept of a television firefighter drama in and of itself, the way such a show is produced and dramatizes real-life emergencies. It introduces a chaotic British actor named Brad who does a bad American accent for the show (they couldn't resist making IRL British person Oliver Stark, who plays Buck with an American accent, compliment Brad on his dialect work). Brad apparently doesn't speak to his own child, but he did save a man from a suicide attempt, so really, we all contain multitudes.
The viewers have been left for several months with many questions, as the show went on winter break on November 21, not to return until March 8, 2025. Are Buck and Tommy getting back together? Is Eddie going to Texas? Will Hen and Karen finally be happy and not have child-endangerment-related drama? Will Maddie and Chimney have a smooth second pregnancy and postpartum period? How much longer do we have to deal with Brad and Gerrard? Will Bobby and Athena build their dream home?
All of these questions really require us to reckon with how much America and Los Angeles have changed since the show went on hiatus. That stupid asshole is the President again. Nearly 60,000 acres have been destroyed by the wildfires. More than ever, 9-1-1 will operate in a parallel reality. And the writers and producers will have to consider how much to diverge – and what to acknowledge. Whether that means more mealy-mouthed Glee speeches (sorry Bryan Safi you did your best) or sobering character vignettes or complete fantasy remains to be seen. So, too, does the show's future: will it be renewed for Season 9? And if so, what world will it portray?
On endings (a farewell to 9-1-1: Lone Star)
There are strange inconsistencies in narrative that can only be born of aversion to reality. By this I do not mean the practice of creating fiction, because obviously fiction is not reality, nor should it be. What I mean is the practice of raising real-world issues directly in fiction and fitting them with misshapen explanations and nonsensical paths of cause and effect. 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Lone Star take place in the same universe, but the faux-Texas BBQ flavor of the show orients itself more firmly in a world of American capitalism's contradictions. This makes its humor a little more biting, and its character meditations all the more effective as a result.
A non-exhaustive list of things that exist in Austin that do not exist in Los Angeles in the 9-1-1 cinematic universe:
homelessness
marijuana
outsider artists
institutional corruption and/or dirty cops
politics of any kind
strangely and conspicuously, actual wildfires
white supremacists
the predatory private health insurance industry
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
sex (the fucking kind)
Which makes it difficult to lose in 2025. Lone Star showrunner Rashad Raisani has described in multiple interviews how the show's ending was something he had foreseen with the cancellation of the original show and its subsequent move to ABC. Lone Star continued to air on FOX, on a different renewal cycle, and Season Five felt like the end for a lot of reasons – so he decided to go apocalyptic on the way out. As he told Variety:
The high concept of this episode being the asteroid and the secondary crisis it causes for our characters — our cast and our crew, we’d all found ourselves in this sort of end-of-the-world feeling for us when our show was canceled, in all of our minds, too soon. I think that was infused in where we wanted to end this season, and put all of our characters and our audience through this feeling that the world was just ending too abruptly. And that’s the theme of these last two episodes, in all of the storylines, and also in terms of our actual emergency.
As the show is winding down, we are hit with a lot of different issues. TK and Carlos are trying to adopt TK's younger brother, but may not be able to unless one of them quits his high-octane job. Owen is poised to move back to New York to become the NYFD fire chief. Captain Vega is dying of aggressive breast cancer, after pursuing a treatment that offered her a 97% chance of survival. Judd is struggling with alcoholism in the absence of his wife, who essentially abandoned him and their toddler to go "help orphans", which was certainly a choice to make when the inimitable Sierra McClain decided to not return to the show in its final season. Mateo is probably going to be deported, and Nancy has told him she doesn't want to marry him because she "doesn't believe in the institution of marriage," which is I guess on brand for an independently wealthy queer person who doesn't have precarious legal status. Marjan, meanwhile, is happily married, and Paul is busy mentoring a nonbinary teen named Jax who can't stop doing Jackass shit for attention. And: suddenly, an asteroid is going to hit Austin. We've already learned in a flash-forward cold open that a nuclear facility meltdown is in the works. Everyone is running around, saying what could be their last words, making peace with their gods. Wayne Knight is there (a very nice use of a notable guest star). The stakes are literally world-breaking.
This franchise is at its best when it does flirt with real disaster, is the thing. But it's something you can only do sparingly, otherwise it loses its effect. Pulling out all the stops at the end of something is, really, the only way you can go out.
I'll digress again, just once more: the last time I saw my father before he died in an automobile accident in January of 2022, we stayed up on New Year's Eve in my apartment with my wife watching Don't Look Up, the movie which lampooned the modern information economy rather incisively while hurtling a planet-destroying comet towards the Earth. I thought it was hysterical – but a lot of people didn't find it funny. I also found it poignant, because of its aggressive humor. The image of being at a table, holding hands with loved ones, making normal conversation while the world is going to be annihilated wholesale thanks to gross incompetence – that one stuck with me. And I think the penultimate episode of Lone Star evokes that feeling. It's all about to change, isn't it, and we don't have any say in what's next anymore – if you accept that, I'm sure, it comes with a kind of peace. If I think about the world ending, I do also think about my dad, who I always would have wanted to have with me at the end, but he had to make his exit a little early. Well, that's it, then, you might think to yourself before the ground begins to fracture and liquefy underneath your feet. We had a good run. And then you say I love you to your loved ones, whether they're there or not.
Obviously, all of that is a hell of a lot deeper than a TV show, but our art touches on that which is most precious and intimate to us, and I actually can't think of anything more intimate than how you might connect with another person at the moment of complete catastrophe. That intimacy is really what gives 9-1-1 its juice. So it makes total sense that this is how Lone Star is going out – and why it can't come with us to the next frontier. It's a five-year cultural snapshot of what we did in this country when we thought things had a chance of getting better instead of getting worse. We were betrayed by those in power, repeatedly and with great prejudice. The future horrors will require different storytelling.
If nothing else, I think the franchise illustrates just how far the United States of America could go as a cohesive cultural project. It illustrates the limits of liberalism as a politic. It illustrates, really, what we can do without structural intervention. We can create beauty without having the ability to protect it. We can live authentically without any guarantee of safety. We can love each other without knowing whether that will ever matter. And, as I stare down the barrel of a cornucopia of real-world disasters that have unfolded throughout my adult life and will continue to unfold until the bitter end, I'm glad that 9-1-1 has been part of it. It re-framed my understanding of this place I live in, which may never be a place again.
And the way Lone Star ends – well, it reinforces all of that. I won't spoil it for you in case you haven't seen it, but I will say this: it died as it lived. Everyone got an ending they deserved. There were happy tears, feelings of shock and despair and feelings of relief. At the same time, though... There was a speech in support of America as an idea, spoken by a character who was literally being threatened with deportation, only to be saved by his own rugged individualism. Also, for some reason, Carlos is still a fucking cop. If that doesn't illustrate the limits of American liberalism, I don't know what does. Together, at the end of the world, we stared into the face of God, saw our own annihilation, and we went back to things exactly as they were before. A police state. A nation state that holds the world hostage to its colonial capitalist whims. A death machine that only knows how to eat and destroy. That's all we can envision returning to. And at the end, we realized this was fine. We were all happy.
The future of 9-1-1 has always been inextricably linked to the future of liberal identity politics in the United States of America. I mean that specifically in opposition to its natural enemies, which include conservative fascist identity politics, but also materialist class politics. The latter should help us carve a path forward against the former. And if we have any hope, the 9-1-1 universe, as delightful as I've found it, probably won't be with us in the end, because I hope to move on from a world where we are constantly creating walled narrative gardens where we have to humanize state and capitalist power, acknowledging its shortcomings while allowing it to keep killing us. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, but when our pop culture produces fantasy with the main purpose of justifying a power structure that is crumbling before our eyes, and showing how we can really be happy within it, we should take that for what it is: an omen.