Full confession – I have heard and seen more damn 9-1-1 in the last few weeks than ever in my life, with certain family members, who shall remain nameless, playing the first 7 seasons of the Ryan Murphy-produced procedural on a ceaseless cycle, trying to catch up before the premiere of Season 8 on Thursday, September 26. But have I personally invested in it? Nope. Could not have cared less. Have I actively sought to watch all the ones that I have missed? That’s negatorio, friends. I know Angela Bassett is in it, and there’s a chicken, a male deer, and a smokestack that, somehow, are main characters. And then they started airing promos for “Buzzkill,” the name of the season-opener, and its “bee-nado” threat. It sounds ridiculous. It looks ridiculous. It looks like I can’t wait to see it. Damn you, ABC, and your local affiliates too. You’ve made me want to watch 9-1-1.
The campaign for the Season 8 premiere of 9-1-1 started creating a buzz in July, with a short, season-premiere date video that begins with the sound of the siren and the series logo. The siren changes, though, to the sound of bees buzzing, and as the logo changes to show the premiere date, a swarm of bees fly across the screen, from one end to the other. Nothing more, nothing less, but dang, what a hook to kick off a promotional campaign that is arguably among one of television’s best. It brilliantly plays on expectations that these teasers foreshadow the season opening, three-episode event arc that has become synonymous with the show, without giving much away. What story line could possibly involve bees, let alone one that spans across three episodes?
Then came late August, and a Season 8 teaser promo that gave viewers just a little more. The 15-second promo begins innocently enough, a shot of a bee resting on a flower. Then an ominous, seemingly random factoid appears on the screen: “THE AVERAGE HUMAN CANNOT SURVIVE 500 BEE STINGS.” The camera then follows the solitary bee as it flies off to the right, where, to the horror of melissophobes everywhere, it joins what appears to be thousands of bees, swarming together in the skies over Los Angeles in what can only be described as a “bee-nado.” The swarm flies toward the camera, and the bee-covered 9-1-1 logo appears, with the phrase “Bee-nado is Coming” right below. Again, a pitch-perfect hook that reveals the “what,” but not the “how.”
The “How” of the “Bee-nado” Leads to Catastrophe for ‘9-1-1’ Season 8
The “how” of the bee-nado gets revealed in another Season 8 teaser released in early September. In it, we see Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), taking a 9-1-1 call as she’s done countless times before, before moving to an explosion that sends a truck sideways and into an oncoming car driven by a woman and her son. Then we hear the call, and it’s downright chilling: “My truck was hauling 22 million killer bees.” Enough bees to kill 44,000. Cut to the panic as the bees attack civilians, chase Ryan Guzman‘s Eddie, and generally befuddle the 118, wondering how to stop them, leading to my candidate for understatement of the year: “Maybe they’ll just fly away?” “Not likely.”
Then a longer trailer is dropped, and a larger picture of the catastrophe caused by the bees is revealed. It starts off again with Maddie. Only the call is from the woman in the car, begging for help as the bees are all over the car (shades of Cujo here). The accident is shown again before the trailer jumps into scenes depicting the mass chaos inflicted by the killer bees. Guests at an outdoor party are sent fleeing, and there’s a shot of someone with multiple stings trying to evade the bees by going underwater, and “Chimney” (Kenneth Choi) in a bee suit, tending to a victim who is barely holding on to life. Then, a nightmare situation where the bees are seen swarming a small personal plane, sending it directly into the path of a commercial jet. A jet that Athena just so happens to be on. The clip ends with Buck (Oliver Stark) giving the swarm of bees the “bee-nado” moniker. This, just days away from the airing of the episode, caps off a campaign that slowly divulges the Season 8 9-1-1 storyline, with a constant build-up of expectations.
But Can 9-1-1 Meet the “Buzzkill” Expectations? Bee-lieve It
What’s most impressive about the promotional campaign for 9-1-1‘s Season 8 premiere is how it touches on everything that has made 9-1-1 stand out from its procedural peers. The bee-nado is the latest in a long line of almost unbelievable, wild emergencies on the show. The humor in the show is intact, and its meta-reference to Sharknado is eye-rolling yet spot-on. And the raw emotions behind the emergencies is also on display, from the very real fear of the mother in the car to Chimney’s urgency to save a life, to the panic aboard the jet plane as disaster heads straight for it. But has it set up expectations that “Buzzkill” can’t possibly meet? You’d better bee-lieve they can. Time and again, 9-1-1 has run with over-the-top, weird emergencies. The bouncy house that took to the skies. The baby flushed down a toilet. A pet snake that gets a little too huggy. A boy getting stuck in a car wash brush. And each time, they’re able to find the real emotion behind it (even if it’s laughter – dude in the brush is pretty darn funny), grounding even the most ridiculous of situations, turning them into tangible, real, and often dangerous threats.
It’s clear that “Buzzkill” also meets another expectation that has come to define some of 9-1-1‘s biggest moments: nods to the Golden Age of disaster films. Showrunner Tim Minear is unapologetic about how he’s inspired by disaster movies he’s seen when creating the season-opening events, particularly films from the genre’s 1970s heyday and the so-called Master of Disaster, Irwin Allen, whose extensive filmography is awash with disaster films. In conversation with The Wrap, Minear states, “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.” Season 7 kicked off with an overturned, sinking ship, the premise of Allen’s 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure (per the previously cited Collider article, the Allen Estate actually cleared 9-1-1 to use The Poseidon Adventure). The 1974 film Earthquake can be seen in Season 2’s opening arc, while Season 3’s tsunami has its roots in something a little more recent, 2009’s 2012. Even the series being set in Los Angeles is a nod to the city’s status as the second most destroyed city on screen.
The most obvious comparable to Season 8’s “Buzzkill” (besides Sharknado, of course) is the Irwin Allen-directed The Swarm from 1978. In that film, a scientist and a military task force try to prevent killer bees from invading Texas. The film, released in the dying days of the genre’s Golden Age, received no love from critics and was a box-office failure, but it’s easy to see, even in that film’s poster alone, how it serves as a basis for the upcoming 9-1-1 opener. However, keen devotees of the disaster genre will also note a nod to another Golden Age disaster film, Airport 1975. In that movie, a small plane collides with a 747, killing the First Officer and the Flight Engineer and incapacitating the Captain, forcing stewardess Nancy (Karen Black) to assume control of the aircraft.
Of course, we don’t know if Athena has to take the controls of the aircraft, nor do we know if the 118 lures the bee-nado out to sea before dousing them with oil and lighting the swarm up, as was the resolution in The Swarm. And this is all outside of the other moments to be addressed in the upcoming season, including the fallout from Athena and Bobby’s (Peter Krause) house being the target of arson, Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen’s (Tracie Thoms) fight for their adoption plans, Eddie coming to terms with his own demons, and the 118’s reaction to Gerrard (Brian Thompson) returning as captain.
Great. I guess I am playing catch-up after all. Damn you, ABC, damn you to hell.
9-1-1 Season 8 premieres on Thursday, September 26. Catch up with previous episodes on Hulu.
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