A little bit ago, Miguel wrote about the new FOX show, Deputy, being a wokefest. Sadly, it is not the worst offender of the new FOX lineup.
There is a fire-rescue show on FOX called 9-1-1 which isn’t bad. It’s progressive but not rub-it-your-face woke, at least, most of the time. They decided after three seasons to do a spinoff that takes place down in Austin, Texas.
Holy shit, they beat you in the face with a woke sledgehammer.
Quick premise. A ladder company in Austin responds to a fire at a grain bin, it blows up, kills all but one of the firefighters.
On a side note: they don’t use a grain explosion, no, they say one of the buildings on site is filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and that causes the explosion. The thing is, that won’t explode unless it’s mixed with a fuel, it’s only an oxidizer. I know this is me being petty, but that was stupid. Grain bin explosions are terrible.
So they hire Rob Lowe as a captain from the NYFD to rebuild the ladder company because he’s done it before after 9/11 when his old ladder company was killed in the south tower.
His son tries to kill himself when the son’s boyfriend breaks up with him as the son tries to propose, causing Lowe to feel the need to get out of town and restart his life.
Also it’s mentioned that the Austin FD had has a “diversity problem.”
Lowe then goes on a recruitment tour, just like out of every other “build a tight-knit team from scratch” trope movie, where he gets the “best of the best” who are loose cannons and losers to everyone else.
He ends up with his “best of the best” being a Muslim woman who is an Instagram influencer during her off hours, a black trans man, a scrawny Hispanic guy with some sort of learning disability that makes him ace the field portion of the FD exam but flunk the written part but has “heart,” his gay son who is a recovering opiate addict, and Liv Tyler who is a very aggressive feminist paramedic who loves putting men in their place when she shows up to save lives.
I’m not saying anyone of those people can’t be a good firefighter. Only that the “best of the best” looks like it was put together by the Dean of Diversity ad Inclusion at Oberlin is hard to swallow.
Also the one survivor of the explosion that started this ball rolling wants his job back but “isn’t ready” and is the only straight white male originally from Texas and is portrayed as a good ‘ol boy meathead who has a problem with diversity in the department, despite being married to a black woman.
All the time, they make Austin look like a one-horse town in the middle of east Texas, instead of the 11th largest city in the United States and the capital of the second-most populous state in the US.
It was so ridiculously over-the-top, I couldn’t make it through the first episode.
Clearly the demographic for this show is the woke crowd that wants to see the Berkeley six make Texas look like a bunch of racists and rednecks every week. I just don’t know if that is a large enough demographic to carry a show.
“His son tries to kill himself when the son’s [black] boyfriend breaks up with him”
Episode 2 does not get any better.
You forgot the obvious nepotism on hiring his son.
And like somebody I saw commenting “So how much they pay firemen in Austin so the can afford a $54,000 a year rent of a house?”
One quibble with your reply. Ammonium nitrate will explode under certain circumstances. The West, Texas feed company had several thousand pounds of it in a shed. It caught fire and several firefighters came to fight it. It exploded with an equivalent of 7-10 tons of TNT and killed 12 people. It flattened apartments, schools and other places. And then there is the Texas City blast. From wiki:
The Texas City disaster was an industrial accident that occurred April 16, 1947, in the Port of Texas City, Texas, at Galveston Bay. It was the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, and one of history’s largest non-nuclear explosions. A mid-morning fire started on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp (docked in the port), and detonated her cargo of approximately 2,200 tons (approximately 2,100 metric tons) of ammonium nitrate.[1] This started a chain reaction of additional fires and explosions in other ships and nearby oil-storage facilities. The events killed a total of at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.[2] The disaster triggered the first-ever class action lawsuit against the United States government, under the recently enacted Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), on behalf of 8,485 victims. A 2-short-ton (1.8-metric-ton) anchor of Grandcamp was hurled 1.62 miles (2.61 km) and found in a 10-foot (3 m) crater. It was installed at a memorial park. The other main 5-short-ton (4.5-metric-ton) anchor was hurled 1⁄2 mile (800 m) to the entrance of the Texas City Dike. It rests on a “Texas-shaped” memorial at the entrance. Burning wreckage ignited everything within miles, including dozens of oil storage tanks and chemical tanks. The nearby city of Galveston, Texas, was covered with an oily fog that left deposits over every exposed outdoor surface.
So, yes, ammonium nitrate can explode without being mixed with fuel.
Thanks for the 411. More shows marked as “avoid at all costs, it’s crap” on my binge-watch list.
The episode I saw last night opened with a woman in the middle of a conference jumping out a window, when the fire crew shows up, half the people are crazy, several others jump.
Of course they don’t seem to ask for assistance like more police and fire? If I run into a bunch of people acting strangely and even killing themselves, I would want a keeper for each of them, and restraints on all of them too, while I get them to a hospital ASAP. And I would want a supervisor if I had multiple injuries and fatalities, and something unexplained.
But the black guy, “doing his thing,” discovers the cause is elemental mercury in the delivery sandwiches. The sandwich has mercury pooling on the lunch meat. How no one noticed the mercury running out of their sandwich when they ate it? No one noticed when they opened their sandwich to add condiments or salt and pepper either?
Cut to nighfall well after the run was over. Of course they call the delivery guy to deliver a meal to the squad, and Ta-Da, they capture the poisoner. How they determined it was him, and not the food preparer or a person at the office building was never explained. But he guiltily tries to run, they find a vial of mercury hidden in his car, so “proof,” and he even spontaneously confesses before commercial break too. They never explain how they know whoever it is doing this isn’t poisoning how many others in the interim; and why they are not the least bit concerned about this possibility either.
I think I lasted nineteen minutes?