Created by Brad Falchuk, Tim Minear and Ryan Murphy, 9-1-1: Lone Star follows NYFD Captain Owen Strand (Rob Lowe, pictured top and below, left) as he relocates to Austin, Texas, with his son and fellow firefighter, T.K. (Ronen Rubenstein, below right), in order to help the firefighters of Firehouse 126 start anew after the tragic loss of their entire crew (almost). Also in the mix is Michelle Blake (Liv Tyler, pictured top right), a paramedic who leads the Austin EMS teams. She’s still reeling from the mysterious disappearance of her sister three years prior that she feels had to have involved some foul play. Jim Parrack -- who I remember as Hoyt from True Blood, but saw most recently in a chilling episode of The CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories-- plays Judd Ryder (great name), the sole survivor of the tragic incident that took the entire 126 crew, or as he called them, his brothers.
What works for this series is how grounded it is. A lot of times, shows feel like they really have to take things to a borderline absurd level for the stakes to increase or change in a way that doesn’t end up feeling repetitive or underwhelming over time. Lone Star doesn’t do that. Every situation the characters have dealt with so far (and there have been many in each episode) -- whether they’ve been personal or professional -- has been steeped in a healthy helping of reality. For example, Captain Strand was the lone survivor of his firehouse, the brave souls of which lost their lives on 9/11. Almost twenty years later he’s been diagnosed with lung cancer. That’s real. There was a situation in the second episode in which a woman’s car rolled during a traffic incident and her baby was thrown, still in the car-seat, right into a nearby tree, totally unharmed. People are thrown from vehicles all time. That includes children, and sometimes those children are lucky enough to emerge unscathed.