ABC May Have Finally Crossed The Line With 9-1-1 Season 9's Story

Published Sep 25, 2026, 9:02 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

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The news that 9-1-1 will open with a volcano causing chaos in Los Angeles crosses a line that the procedural never quite arrived at before, despite how silly the ABC series has always been. The network TV procedural show has undergone quite a transformation over the last 20 years. In part due to streaming shows altering audience narrative expectations and in part due to the sheer preponderance of procedural franchises increasing the need for novelty in the format, procedural shows are reinventing themselves left, right, and center.

On CBS, the Yellowstone spinoff Marshals brands itself as a procedural series, but mostly functions as a highly serialized sequel to Taylor Sheridan’s earlier soapy Neo-Western saga. On the same network, the NCIS franchise’s prequel NCIS: Origins spins a dual timeline story in season 3, meaning the show is now both a prequel period piece set in the past and, simultaneously, a sequel series set in the present starring returning franchise icon Mark Harmon.

Meanwhile, perhaps the greatest innovation in the procedural space comes from the ABC franchise 9-1-1, which began back in 2017 and has since spawned the spinoffs 9-1-1: Lone Star and 9-1-1: Nashville. While creator Ryan Murphy’s deservedly infamous Netflix true crime anthology Monster might be more controversial, 9-1-1 deserves credit for thoroughly rewriting the usual rules of network cop shows. The series focuses on first responders more broadly, including firefighters and paramedics, making this a rare cop show that isn’t actually about law enforcement officers.

9-1-1 Season 10 Opens With A Volcanic Tragedy

ABC

There are plenty of police officers among 9-1-1’s main cast of characters, but the show’s focus on emergency situations ranging from citywide catastrophes to unusual medical maladies means 9-1-1 is far from a conventional police procedural. Instead, the series functions as a strange melange of medical drama, cop show, and disaster movie, as any given episode of the show is as likely to focus on a wide-ranging threat like a terrorist attack as it is to center an unfortunate civilian’s unexplained spontaneous combustion.

If these two examples feel somewhat far fetched, they only represent the tip of the iceberg for the franchise. Compared to shows like HBO’s hit The Pitt, which center believability and verisimilitude over all else, 9-1-1 plays cheerfully fast and loose with reality in search of the wildest plots and most unexpected emergencies imaginable. Making shows like CSI and Grey’s Anatomy seem grounded, the ABC show has put viewers through no shortage of eye-roll-inducing storylines in its first eight seasons.

That said, season 10’s planned premiere storyline truly takes things to a new level of absurdity. According to TVInsider’s interview with show runner Tim Minear, 9-1-1’s season 10 premiere will see the team take on a giant sinkhole that soon become a massive volcano. Minear notes that, although earlier unlikely real-life events have seemingly mirrored storylines from 9-1-1 in the past, the discovery of a sinkhole in West Hollywood in July means reality has “beaten us (the show’s creators) to the punch.”

Why 9-1-1 Season 10's Opening Tragedy May Have Finally Crossed The Line

A multi-episode epic event, 9-1-1’s “quite catastrophic” season 10 premiere storyline will see the show’s heroes race against time to stop this newly formed volcano from devouring the entire city. While 9-1-1 season 10’s volcano storyline admittedly sounds dramatic and wild, readers might be forgiven for surreptitiously opening another tab while reading this article to see if they are wrong about some basic geology.

Rest assured, there are no active volcanoes in Los Angeles, and the only remotely nearby volcanic fields in the greater Southern Californian region have experienced no eruptions in over 10-40,000 years. While viewers are used to the show's ridiculousness by now, at least previous cases were somewhat rooted in reality. In comparison, season 10’s premiere seems to be audaciously upping the ante in a way that could prove counterproductive, stripping the show of its stakes by getting too absurd for its own good.

The 9-1-1 sister series Doctor Odyssey offers an unfortunate case study in this pitfall, as the cruise ship-set medical drama started out strong but ended up feeling too silly to have any substance by the end of season 1. While a handful of wacky cases might have added color to the show’s story, encountering yet another unlikely medical disaster in every single outing left some viewers wondering whether the entire show itself was the fever dream of a dying protagonist. Which is hardly something most writers want viewers to theorize.

Murphy’s shows have always been accused of treading a thin line between enjoyable camp and sheer silliness, the latter of which can deprive a series of stakes and leave viewers with little reason to continue tuning in. According to some critics, this increasingly heightened and silly storytelling was one of the death knells that spelled the end for Glee, although 9-1-1’s focus on disasters means the show had gotten much sillier and stranger than that high school dramedy ever did before 9-1-1's first season even ended.

What 9-1-1's Volcano Call Reveals About Season 10

ABC

By the season 10 premiere, the 9-1-1 crew has been to space, saved characters from being eaten by whales, salvaged cruise ships from tsunamis while fighting off pirates, and landed a plane in the middle of an LA freeway. These events make Murphy’s infamously silly American Horror Story seem like a modest work of kitchen sink realism, but absurdity has always been part of the show’s appeal.

The volcano storyline proves that 9-1-1 has no intention of tamping down its increasing silliness with the next outing of the procedural, but viewers would do well to recall that the show’s pilot episode focused on a storyline involving a baby flushed down a toilet. To the procedural’s credit, 9-1-1 has never hidden its straight faced goofiness from viewers or masqueraded as a more grounded series.

Thus, the volcano of season 10’s premiere represents something of a tipping point for viewers. Either fans of the ABC show will embrace this descent into full-on live-action cartoon territory and accept that the show’s campiness can only get funnier and more watchable the sillier it becomes, a la Riverdale and the Fast & Furious movies, or 9-1-1 viewers will need to stage an intervention and plead with its creators to bring the procedural series back down to something resembling reality.

Source: TVInsider

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