‘9-1-1 Lone Star’ Showrunner Tim Minear Refuses To Let A Pandemic Prevent Him From Upping The Ante On Action-Packed Tragedy

In December, fans of Fox’s 9-1-1 had to bid farewell to the firefighters and paramedics of the 118 for the year, as a midseason finale brought us an impromptu Christmas celebration for the residents of a collapsed apartment building. It also brought us some soul-searching from Eddie (Ryan Guzman) about whether fighting fires might be the wrong line of work for a single father to a young boy whose mother also recently died. While Eddie takes a few months off to ponder that question, we can check back in with his colleagues at Austin’s Station 126 as 9-1-1: Lone Star takes over 9-1-1‘s Monday night time slot. Of course, at this point, the 126 is more of an idea than a ladder company, the fire house having been marked for closure — due to budget cuts — in the Season 2 finale. The old crew still aren’t entirely at ease in their new assignments when we rejoin them after a huge time jump, from May to January, but their job satisfaction soon becomes a less pressing concern when Austin finds itself in the grip of a ripped-from-the-headlines ice storm.

On the eve of 9-1-1: Lone Star‘s Season 3 premiere, Decider spoke to showrunner Tim Minear about the challenges of producing two action series during the pandemic, how he and his team pull off their biggest onscreen events, and which of her peers 9-1-1 star Jennifer Love Hewitt suspects he may one day try to replace her with.

(Warning: Some 9-1-1 Lone Star SPOILERS for the Season 3 premiere are below. Proceed with caution!)

DECIDER: Both shows in the 9-1-1 franchise are generally fairly apolitical, but they are medical shows, and public health should not be an especially divisive topic. What conversations have there been about using the platform of the show to promote vaccination, beyond what we’ve already seen?

Tim Minear: I don’t know that we’ve had specific conversations about that. When the vaccines started to happen in real life, we just reflected that on the show, and of course our first responders got vaccinated. It wasn’t really controversial back then, you know? Everyone was sort of hoping for a vaccine. And then by the time that controversy exploded, we were kind of beyond it. So we haven’t really hit it as a hot-button topic.

But I did approach the show slightly differently in terms of how much mask time was on screen. It was sort of an experiment when this thing first happened. I mean, I was doing post[-production] on the end of Season 3 of 9-1-1 and finishing Season 1 of Lone Star in March of 2020. And I remember getting in my car to drive to the lot, to get into a small editing room, to work on an episode of 9-1-1. And I thought, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t be in a small editing room right now.” I turned around, I came back home, and I kind of haven’t left since. I have produced the end of Season 3, all of Season 4, half of Season 5 [of 9-1-1], all of Season 2 and the first half of Season 3 of Lone Star like a Bond villain. I’m sitting in the lair. I have my screens. I have my Zoom writer’s rooms. I have my taps to the set so I’m watching the shoot live on my feed. And then I have systems that are hooked in to the editors with the Avids. And it’s like sitting in the editing room, but all of this is happening on my screens at my desk and I’m sitting here in my pajamas, you know, running my empire, literally like a Bond villain.

Nothing that you’ve previously worked on probably prepared you for this specific moment, but especially not for how to respond to a cast member who won’t get vaccinated, which happened this season with Rockmond Dunbar. What was it like for you to manage that?

You just have to say the Serenity Prayer, in a way. One can’t control other people, nor do I have any interest in controlling other people. The only thing you can really control is your reaction to a situation. I’ve known Rock for many years — we worked together on a show called Terriers, and then I cast him on this show because I knew how genius he was. I supported his autonomy to make decisions for himself. And I also explained that the company has a policy, and we work for a company, and there’s only so much I can do. But what I did do was, I facilitated as grateful an exit as I could for him. I didn’t kill him. I could have had his brain tumor come back. But we decided we would give him an elegant exit so that if this madness ever went away, it doesn’t completely foreclose the possibility of him coming back. I think all the people who work with me and for me know that I’m on their team, and I think they feel supported. And if they don’t, I hope they would call me because my door is always open.

You gave an interview to observer.com last summer, after the season finales of both shows. Eddie, at that point, had just been shot by a sniper; you said he’d be fine because, and I quote, “Ryan is too pretty to die.” But now Eddie’s future is in question. Is Ryan too pretty for Eddie to move to another town or do a different job?

I mean, he’s only pretty enough to move to Texas, possibly. But, you know, he’s not leaving California. He’s not leaving the ship. Eddie’s going through a crisis. And it’s always a challenge when you have a long-running show, as I’ve discovered. My Twitter handle is @CancelledAgain, and was before “cancelled” was even a thing, because of my prodigious failures, and there have been many. Normally my shows go ten or 13 episodes. Well, I guess “normally” is not fair anymore, because American Horror Story is going into its whatever millionth season, and the 9-1-1 shows are now long-running. But it’s always tricky to keep the same feeling, like you’re not just on a hamster wheel; you want to find ways to expand a character story and find different things for them to do.

I will say the thing that both shows, I think, do the best is reunite people. The best example would be the tsunami. Poor Christopher is out there with Buck, and nobody knows they’re out there. And then everybody is separated because they’re all doing different things. And then Christopher gets separated from Buck, but it all builds to reuniting the characters. Often I will pull things apart in order to create a road back home. Hopefully that doesn’t feel like bullshit, right? We hope these are stories that mean something. Buck has a medical issue and then he sues the Fire Department, and whether you like that story or not, these are just attempts for us as writers to try to expand the character arcs and to keep things fresh and to explore something new. So I’m going to constantly be throwing grenades into their world. It’s funny because the fans who love the show — you see a lot of tweets like “Why do you have to keep hurting our characters?” Like, you do understand that what you are lobbying for is to have your favorite character not be on screen. Because as soon as the story is “Pass the salt, this was a delicious dinner you prepared,” that’s not a story I can write. Right? I know that on Lone Star all the Tarlos people are going to be really mad at me when the season starts. But it’s like, no, this is a rich and interesting way to tell another story with these guys.

Speaking of people leaving: Maddie is gone — presumably just temporarily, since Jennifer Love Hewitt has a new baby — but you added Vanessa Estelle Williams as a 9-1-1 operator and became part of her big year. [In 2020, Williams also appeared in American Horror Stories, The L Word: Generation Q, and the new Candyman feature film.] What made her the right choice to play May’s antagonist, Claudette?

She’s a brilliant actor, for one thing. And interestingly enough, we’d gone down some other roads and they were all proving slightly fruitless. Even before [Casting Director] Shawn Dawson could suggest Vanessa, [Executive Producer] John J. Gray, who does 9-1-1: Lone Star and also American Horror Story, had worked with her on Horror Stories, and was talking about how great she was and what a fan she was of the show. So almost at the 11th hour, I reached out to her. She was getting ready to go off to promote Candyman or something and had 24 hours’ notice, and she said, “Yep, I’ll do it.” She came in, she got fitted. She walked on the set, like, the next day for that big introduction scene where she’s going through the call and then meeting May for the first time, all that stuff. She just came in and nailed it. So what made her right was the universe! The tumblers clicked into place and she was the right artist for the right job, you know?

Also, with regard to May, giving her a storyline about handling a difficult coworker is another great way to transition her from a kid character to an adult character.

Yeah. That was exactly my plan. I knew that I wouldn’t have Jennifer Love Hewitt for the middle of the season and I love all those characters in the call center. I had an opportunity to shake things up and to do it in a way that was like with Gloria in Season 2, where Maddie bumped heads with another dispatcher who was hanging up on people. I also wanted to bring in somebody who felt like they had some gravitas. The joke that Jennifer Love Hewitt always makes to me is “You’re going to hire Alyssa Milano.” And so I didn’t want it to feel like I was trying to replace Jennifer Love Hewitt, who is entirely irreplaceable. I wanted someone to come in and to make May a more interesting character by giving her something to run up against.

Will that be it for Claudette when Maddie comes back, or will there be room for them both?

Well, I think Claudette was always a plan for the middle of the season, but you know, never say never. I mean I didn’t know that I was going to bring Julian Works back as another person. He was Marvin in the earthquake episode on 9-1-1, and now Marvin is famously Mateo’s felon cousin in L.A.

Let’s talk about Lone Star. As soon as the news hit about the Texas ice storm in 2021, you must have known you would have to make freak winter weather a plotline in Season 3. What is the process in a writer’s room when you’re working out a big showstopper like this?

The process is always the same, which is “What the hell are we going to do next?!” It’s funny because when we were going through Season 2 of Lone Star, we kept coming up with these big ideas: “There’s going to be a serial arsonist, and then Charles is going to die,” and everything started to feel like a season finale. So by the time we got to the actual season finale, we were like, “Oh shit. What are we going to do?” Somebody had pitched the haboob, the dust storm. And [Executive Producer] Rashad [Raisani] and some of the other writers had been talking about the cold snap that happened in Austin in 2021. We talked about doing that, and at first I hesitated. A tsunami is one thing, right? You create the spectacle, you build some streets in a tank in Mexico and you have the big event and then you have the fighting against the receding water and it’s very visual. But cold is cold. So it’s like, “Okay, the power goes out.” Well, that’s a little bit like what I did at the beginning of 9-1-1 with the power outage. So that can be an element, but it can’t be the whole thing. I tried to create the effect of a thing happening suddenly by slamming from May to January. But it’s still not like a big event, like a tsunami or an earthquake hits. It’s a thing that sort of happens over a period of time.

So the question was, first of all, how do we make it snow in Texas while we’re shooting it in Los Angeles and it’s 90 degrees. That was a trick. We shot the whole thing here in the summer. So all of that is the magic of my genius practical and digital effects people — mostly practical.

What you’re sort of asking is where do you get your ideas? Desperation. “Oh shit, we’re going to be shooting.” In Season 1, I remember Rashad and I were working on the finale of the solar storm. We were probably four days into prep of an eight- or nine-day prep period. And we still didn’t know what we were going to do. All I knew is that I wanted to have a 9-1-1 call from outer space. That is sort of where the international space station call came from. Somebody had talked about a solar storm. And the reason I went with it is because it’s invisible. I didn’t have to create a tsunami wave. All I had to do was have the lights flash and then a Bird scooter go off by itself. You just sort of create the weirdness of that “she blinded with me with science” moment.

As you just said, you don’t shoot in Austin. Have there ever been conversations about set pieces that would require shooting on location?

For the pilot, we did go to Austin. We’ve now sent drones out there twice, to get drone shots of Austin — obviously the iconic Capitol Building. But so far, it’s just been cost-prohibitive. And obviously then the pandemic happened. I mean, it’s incredible that we actually managed to produce that crossover last year, with the wildfire, at the height of the pandemic. Even though we are on the same lot, and even though it’s the same company, you have to be into the protocols of whatever production it is you’re working on. So you can’t just walk off the 9-1-1 set onto the Lone Star set because you are now cross-contaminated, theoretically.

How often do you come up with a bonkers idea that you have to abandon due to physics or biology?

Sometimes? Not so much because of physics or biology. I’ll generally find a way, and we’ve got some great cases coming up in the first half of the season for Lone Star. The snowstorm thing was obviously very challenging. So was the tsunami. That should not have been possible for us to do. That’s all credit to Bob Williams, who was the line producer on 9-1-1 who was like, “We’ll go down to Mexico. There’s the tanks where they shot Titanic. We’ll build the streets and the tank.” And he’s like, “Do you want the ferris wheel from the Santa Monica Pier?” I’m like, “Yes?” So when you see all that, that’s not a CGI ferris wheel over some water. We built that goddamned thing. We built half or two-thirds of that ferris wheel in that tank in Mexico. And when it falls over, it’s falling over. That wasn’t even in the script. Bob called me like, “Hey, when the Zodiac’s pulling away from the ferris wheel, do you want it to collapse into the ocean?” I’m like, “Yes?” The people that I work with are just so good at what they do. Brad Bueker: special shout-out to him; he directs most of these big event things.

But in terms of bonkers things: when I start, there’s two ways to go, right? One is, there’s some weird image that you have, and then you have to figure out a story on how to get to it. Like somebody in a plastic surgeon’s office with her face falling off. How do you get to that? Well, I guess I have to make everyone around her pass out. Well, what would make that happen? So you’re sort of reverse-engineering it.

Creating these little pieces is always very complicated. I mean, there have been attempts to do things that just didn’t work. It took two tries to get the Tinder poop date case to work. We shot a whole version of it with Buck, actually, that was terrible, so I threw it out, but Kristen and I loved it so much — which probably says how incredibly lowbrow we are, that we tried it again. And we finally got some version of it that we liked.

I was going to do penis captivus in Season 2 of 9-1-1, which is a thing where the woman’s body clamps down around the man’s body. They get stuck and it’s a real thing. Right? And so we had a whole story that we had worked out, of an older guy who took some Viagra and he’s in a hot tub with his lady, and then this thing happens, but also he kind of passes out and he’s having maybe a cardiac event and then they’re in the water. It was hilarious and it was fun, and it was Standards and Practices that said, “No, you can’t do it.” Sometimes that’ll happen, but that’s not all that often. I don’t want to say anything that’s going to piss off Standards and Practices, But half the time, I don’t understand sort of where the line is. I guess anything that suggests actual penetration is a no-no.

I wrote a piece last summer where I made the case for Fox to build the franchise out even further, so that new episodes of one or another 9-1-1 series could be running continuously through the year. Probably not something you want, but how close is that dream to coming true for me personally?

Right now I’m at the place where I’m hopefully making the dream come true for you where we won’t go off for ten weeks.

Great!

I mean, you have no idea how incredibly difficult it is. I’m not going to say I’m a control freak, because I’m really not. Because [Executive Producer] Kristen Reidel has been ably keeping that train on the track at 9-1-1 and allowing me to focus on Lone Star for the last several months. But between breaking stories, writing scripts, and then once the cuts start to come in and then you have to get them ready for air, it was just nonstop. In fact, when we did the season finale for Lone Star last year, I think we finished shooting it on a Thursday. I had to cut it and had it finished by Saturday, and it aired on Monday. It was literally insane. We were on Evercast, which is the editing link. And so I have my editors on these Zoom boxes. I had every editor working on that episode, so it was like the Jerry Lewis telethon. I would be on, and then one editor would come in and it’s like, “Christine, what do you have for us today?” We’d go through the scenes. Then she’d cut, and she’d leave, and then Julie would come in, and then she’d leave, and then Robbie would come in, and we were just on there all night. I mean, I fell asleep a couple times, which was crazy.

It is like making 15 action movies in a year, what you’re doing.

I have a friend staying with me right now and she hadn’t seen Season 2 [of Lone Star], so we actually binged it. I hadn’t really watched it and I’m like, “Wow, this is really good.” And also, of course, because I made the sausage, I’m sort of pointing out to her, “So here’s where I ran out of money.” And when I ran out of money, it’s like, “Okay, what can I do? Oh, I have an idea. It’s Gina Torres in a room with a dead body for seven minutes.” Like that was just as exciting as an explosion. Right? Just watching her act. And so a lot of the things that were dictated by circumstance, it was interesting just to watch it, because we still had tragedy and adventure and romantic comedy and it was all there.

That is actually what I love about these shows that I have done. I sort of come from genre; I did Angel and Wonderfalls, all these different things. But the thing that I’ve almost always done is had something that felt a little comic-booky with humor, but with absolutely unapologetic sentimentality. That’s Firefly; that’s my jam. And what I’ve been able to do on these two shows is, I can do a caper, or I can do giant soaring soap, or I can do an Irwin Allen disaster movie, and as long as I believe what’s happening to the characters, the audience generally will. It’s actually funny because when I was doing network TV, when I started out, all I wanted to do was go to cable. I wanted to go to the edgy cable place and be an edgy cable guy. And I did that, but now I’m doing these network shows and I’m actually completely free to tell whatever stories I want to tell. It’s mad. I love it.

That Season 2 episode of Lone Star [“Everyone And Their Brother”] that starts with the call from the conjoined twins, and then also has the minefield scene, is the one that I use to introduce people to the show.

Oh, that’s great. The fans had a kind of a lukewarm— Well it’s hard to say “fans,” because on Twitter, if it’s not Tarlos, they’re like, “Why is Rob Lowe on my screen?” All they care about is Tarlos. But I loved that script. I thought it was great. And we actually have something coming up this year that’s similar. I wanted to do something — I think [Staff Writer] Johnny Lowe pitched it, also Rashad had been talking about it for a while — with the rivalry between police and firemen. So we did an episode called “Red Versus Blue,” and there’s just this great antagonist police officer who’s telling them to move their fire truck, ticketing it, until finally there’s a big softball game. It’s great. And then Dominic Burgess, who played Victor Buono on Feud, I added him to the call center, and he’s sitting in Grace’s seat. I think it’s going to be really fun, but I love that you love that episode because I love that script.

What other TV are you loving right now?

I have the last episode of Landscapers. Oh my God. They’re so good. I mean, Olivia [Colman] is amazing and David Thewlis is every inch her equal. I mean, it’s so good. But honestly, I’ve just been too busy making TV to watch it!

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.

Watch 9-1-1 Lone Star Season 3 on Fox