Warning: spoilers are ahead for the Season 8 premiere of 9-1-1, called "Buzzkill."
The eighth season of 9-1-1 (which is only the second second on ABC after the move from Fox) has kicked off in the 2024 TV schedule, and the promos for the premiere weren't shy about hyping the bee-nado heading for Los Angeles. The bee-nado was... well, pretty what it sounds like in the post-Sharknado pop culture zeitgeist, and it actually was way more thrilling than I expected it to be. "Buzzkill" was a fun way to spend an hour of primetime, but there's one element from the episode that kills my buzz.
How "Buzzkill" Beat My Expectations
First things first – I want to be clear that I didn't have low expectations going into the premiere, per se, but a bee-nado just doesn't have the scale of the Poseidon Adventure-esque crisis of Season 7 that rivaled the tsunami disaster of Season 3. I figured the swarm of millions of bees menacing LA and taking down a plane would be entertaining, but not really rank among the drama's most epic openers. (You can revisit both the cruise ship crisis and tsunami disaster streaming with a Hulu subscription.)
Joke's on me! I really did underestimate how epic 9-1-1 could get with tens of millions of bees, and I do have the credit the show for finding yet another premiere-worthy disaster after already delivering some of the more obvious ones in earlier years. A plane being downed by bees? An allergic mother and daughter trapped in their car by bees? A garden party crashed by bees? The surprise twist of a second plane – this one carrying Athena and Dennis Jenkins – possibly going down? It was a harrowing use of the insects and I have to applaud the show for pulling it off in the premiere.
But one part of the premiere really stuck out to me as making no sense, even with my usual willingness to suspend disbelief for action-packed shows like 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Lone Star.
What I Can't Buy
My struggle with suspension of disbelief actually started well into the episode, following the first bee crisis on the bridge that Buck managed to resolve with smoke (and then get punished by Captain Gerrard for it). The episode shifted to an in-show news broadcast, with the anchor stating:
Epinephrine and calamine lotion have been flying off store shelves all across the Southland after a long haul truck carrying some 22 million killer bees jack-knifed today just east of downtown. And we're hearing that the hives now have merged into what entomologists are calling a 'super swarm,' 15 million strong.
The on-site reporter chimed in to say that the super swarm dropped off radar just before sunset, but that experts warn "these killer bees don't fly after dark so with temps dropping, it's likely that they've just bedded down for the night." Pretty scary, right? The scene then flipped to Maddie and Chimney's house, where the news broadcast was literally on as Hen and Karen dropped by with Denny and a bunch of pizzas.
At this point, I assumed that this was Hen and Karen deciding to shelter with Maddie and Chimney, so that they could batten down the hatches to keep the bees out of just one house instead of two and keep all the kids as safe as possible. Surely they were also bringing other supplies in addition to the pizzas, right? After all, Chim and Hen were in the thick of the bees to see how bad it was earlier that day, and Maddie certainly had an idea after the 9-1-1 call with the young girl and her mom.
But nope! No hunkering down, battening of hatches, or sealing of cracks from doors and windows. Just a normal night of pizza, as if there was no swam of killer bees just waiting for sunrise to start stinging again. And these two families weren't the only ones who didn't seem to be making any kind of fuss over the super swarm of bees. Buck and Tommy were hanging out at Eddie's with no sign that they were hunkering down. Nobody seemed to be taking advantage of the bee-free night hours to take precautions.
That seemed especially odd in light of the news broadcast specifically noting that people in LA were buying out calamine lotion and epinephrine across the city. (Also, can you actually purchase over-the-counter epinephrine in LA?) I could easily buy that the civilian woman who put all of her divorce settlement into launching a perfume brand would risk the bees for a garden party, but not these first responders.
Am I being way too nitpicky here? Perhaps, but it just didn't make sense to me, and I pretty immediately became more invested in Athena's storyline that didn't involve the bees in "Buzzkill." It remains to be seen how much longer 9-1-1 will play out the bee part of the three-part premiere event since there's now the plane crash problem to deal with.
See what happens next with new episodes of 9-1-1 on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, ahead of the network's new medical drama Doctor Odyssey at 9 p.m. ET and Season 21 of Grey's Anatomy in its new 10 p.m. ET time slot. I'll definitely still be watching as 9-1-1 continues on Thursdays this fall, and hopefully what happens next will totally eclipse what distracted me so much from the premiere.