From a newborn baby trapped in a drain pipe to a giant snake choking its owner, 9-1-1 showcases some crazy emergencies in its series premiere. Ryan Murphy's Fox drama follows an emergency from a 9-1-1 call all the way to the resolution of some situations, all told through the eyes of three emergency responders of. But the most gripping part of the series premiere had nothing to do with the first responders themselves. The most shocking thing is that 9-1-1 emergencies are based on actual 9-1-1 calls, as some events may not even seem possible.
While emergencies vary from week to week, 9-1-1 's three main characters remain the same throughout the series: Friday Night Lights favorite Connie Britton Playing 9-1-1 dispatcher Abby Clark, "Parenthood" alum Peter Krause plays firefighter Bobby Nash and "American Horror" Story" actress Angela Bassett plays Los Angeles Police Department officer Athena Grant. The program may sound predictable enough, but it has a fascinating twist: While all three protagonists work to mitigate the same emergency, they almost never interact with each other. Of course, their personal lives after get off work are a mess.
But the most interesting thing is the crazy emergencies they deal with. First there were babies in the pipes: When a drunk man heard a baby crying on the bathroom wall, he called 9-1-1. But the fire department also heard the baby crying when they arrived on scene, so it wasn't just a drug-induced hallucination. There's a baby stuck in a pipe behind his wall! Yes, seriously .
It turns out that a teenage girl gave birth to her baby on an exposed pipe on the top floor of an apartment building that was under construction, and her father shamed her into abandoning the baby. Firefighters cut into the wall to isolate the tube where the newborn was stuck, gently pulled it out and rushed it to the hospital.
As weird as it sounds for a baby to be flushed down a pipe, it can't be true... right? ! Incorrect. In China in 2013, this. Actually. happened. "[Creator] Ryan [Murphy] heard about the wall baby story from a Chinese YouTube video, and it actually happened. Isn't that shocking?" Executive Producer Alexis Martin Woodall tells Bustle. "I remember when we were filming it, I thought, 'This is really happening!' There are crazy things going on in our world, and first responders live lives that are so different from ours, and we want to appreciate them."
A real-life baby trapped in a tube was secretly born to a single mother and survived his rescue attempts. When executive producer Brad Falchuk first heard the story, he was "fascinated by it for years."
"If you watch the actual Chinese video, it's really hard to watch," he tells Bustle. "That baby survived." But the story in "9-1-1" doesn't play out exactly the same way on screen as it does in real life. The showrunners took images they saw in YouTube videos and created their own stories.
"The interesting thing is, once you have this [story], you can construct, well, what are the things that could go wrong?" Falchuk said of the storytelling process. "It's fun to come up with different ways to cause trouble for them. It's the same thing you do on any medical show. Generally speaking, the real stuff is more interesting than the stuff you make up."
Executive producer Tim Minear, another big fan of the baby in Drainpipe Tales, joked that while "it's always great if you can find something to improvise on," in At some point, "we have to start making things up because that's what they're paying us to do." But he explained that the process the writers came up with for "9-1-1" was to find these real-life crazinesses story and then expand on it.
"Babies in the pipes are the genesis of our work on these cases. We're trying to make viral videos," Minear said. "What great, amazing, WTF moments might you see on YouTube, in a compilation of ultimate failure or the most horrific tragedies or things that went wrong? Finding the story in those is harder than you think."
While he promised they weren't just "getting stuff from the internet," Minear and the other producers wanted to bring as much reality into the new program as possible. “That was our inspiration, to try to fit into the social media culture where media is everywhere and cameras are everywhere,” Minear said. “People are used to seeing real-life events that are mind-boggling.”
Woodall added that placing all emergencies in the new series means 9-1-1 is "escapist but still relevant." "There's hope," she said. "Some people are going to die because it's an emergency show, but some people are going to survive and you're going to see them succeed." In addition to the baby in the drainpipe, the premiere also featured a giant snake trying to pull the likes of The snake's owner suffocated and firefighters actually cut off the snake's head to save her. You guessed it: it's also inspired by real-life stories.
“Everything in the first episode is inspired by true stories,” Falchuk promises. "The real problem we have is, we do a lot of weird things on 'American Horror Story,' and sometimes we come up with something and it's like, oh no, we just did that." Although he promised audiences will see Firefighters put out real fires, but that's not all they do.
"It's not as fun to go out and fight fires, and we've seen this before," Falchuk said. "We really wanted to tell stories that we'd never seen before. We wanted to do a network program, but our version, a little bit unusual, with a little twist. It's like Nip/Tuck , but a network program. We want you to My jaw dropped."
Of course, 9-1-1 also depicts more normal emergency situations. In the premiere alone, a burglary was prevented, a little girl's life was saved, a teen was rescued from drowning, and sadly, a woman was rescued after firefighters lifted her off a ledge He ended his life before being persuaded to come down. But Minear promises there are more stories to come, like a baby in a drainpipe and a giant snake that strangled its owner, and that they're all based on true stories.
"I would say, in the first five episodes, there are at least five things you're going to say, 'Well, I don't believe that,' and those are all based on real things," he said with a smile. So no matter how crazy things may seem, remember that real-life first responders actually have to deal with these situations. More often than not, they figure out a way to save the situation.
