Series / 9-1-1

"9-1-1, what's your emergency?"

9-1-1 is a police and rescue procedural drama created and produced by the creative trio of Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Tim Minear (known collectively for their work on American Horror Story), which premiered on Fox on January 3rd, 2018.

Taking place in Los Angeles, the series tackles the lives of the city's first responders through the leading lens of LAPD Sergeant Athena Grant (Angela Bassett), LAFD Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), and 911 operator Abby Clark (Connie Britton). Athena and her estranged husband, Michael (Rockmond Dunbar), jointly raise their kids May (Corinne Massiah) and Harry (Marcanthonee Jon Reis). Also in focus are LAFD firefighters Evan "Buck" Buckley (Oliver Stark), Hen Wilson (Aisha Hinds), and Howard "Chimney" Han (Kenneth Choi), joined in the second season by Eddie Díaz (Ryan Guzman), who is raising a son, Christopher (Gavin McHugh). After Abby decides to resign and leave Los Angeles at the end of the first season, her role as 911 operator is replaced by Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Buck's sister.

A spinoff, titled 9-1-1: Lone Star, debuted January 19, 2020. In 2023, the series was renewed for a 7th season, which Channel Hopped to ABC, with Lone Star remaining on Fox, making 9-1-1 the first TV franchise to have different entries airing simultaneously on different broadcast networks since the Buffyverse (where Angel was airing on The WB while Buffy the Vampire Slayer was airing on UPN), also a 20th Television property.

Not to be confused with Rescue 911, a series re-enacting a variety of real-life emergency situations, which ran from 1989 to 1996.

It has a character sheet and a recap page. Tropers are encouraged to contribute.

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This show provides examples of:

• A Day in the Limelight: Since this show is an ensemble cast, it's expected for them to have multiple episodes focused on their background.
  • Bobby has Point of Origin and Bobby Begins Again revolving around his late wife and kids and his addiction.
  • Hen has Hen Begins and Tomorrow, the former about the discrimination she faces on her early days at the 118 under her former captain while the latter she shares with her wife Karen about their love story.
  • Chimney has Chimney Begins, detailing how he becomes a firefighter and his life with his foster family, especially his foster brother Kevin.
  • Maddie technically has Fight or Flight and Boston, the former about his abusive relationship with Doug and the latter she shares with Chimney about her PPD.
  • Athena has Athena Begins and The Devils Among Us, both about Athena's motivations to become a cop.
  • Eddie has Eddie Begins, telling a struggle he and Shannon face during the first years of Christopher's life.
  • Buck has Buck Begins, showing his childhood under his neglectful parents.
• Abusive Parents: This show sure has quite a case of disappointing parents.
  • Shown multiple times on calls. Notable examples are the pilot episode, where a young woman flushes her premature newborn down the toilet, and Season 4's Suspicion, where a mother is revealed to be deliberately poisoning her son.
  • After the death of Chim's mother when he was a teenager, his father left him to be raised in California by the Lees while he went back to Hong Kong, rarely communicating with him and acting cold and unkind in the few interactions they did have. While he has a good relationship with the Lees and views them as his surrogate parents, his relationship with his biological father is extremely strained.
  • Eddie's parents despise Shannon for leaving Eddie and Christopher while belittling Eddie's parenting choices (Eddie's mother even says Eddie is dragging Christopher down with him), despite Eddie's father himself being generally absent in his children's lives, even missing all three of his children's deliveries. They also try to guilt-trip Eddie into giving them Christopher under the assumption that it's "better for him," ignoring that it was at the cost of taking Chris from his actual parent. This prompts Eddie to move with Christopher to L.A.. It's notable in Season 4 that, though they're on more cordial terms with each other, Eddie decides to name Buck as Christopher's legal guardian if Eddie were to die.
  • It's revealed in Season 4 that Buck was conceived by his parents as a savior baby in order to be a stem cell donor to cure their firstborn son Daniel's leukemia. When Daniel died of his illness anyway, they were cold and neglectful towards him to the point where he would deliberately injure himself because it was the only way he could get their attention. They also asked Maddie, who was still a child herself, to keep this a secret from Buck and refused to allow her to talk about Daniel, which caused her a significant amount of distress, on top off leaving her badly parentified at the age of nine. Their grief over their son's death, while very real and understandable, is not an excuse for the way they treated their surviving children.
• Action Girl: Sergeant Athena Grant is definitely one.
• Action Mom: Athena ticks all the boxes.
• Actor Allusion: In 5x05, when Hen tells Eddie to keep up with her by saying "Don't step on your toes," Eddie quickly remarks that he's "an excellent dancer." This refers to Ryan Guzman's role in Step Up: Revolution and Step Up: All In.
• Actually Pretty Funny: At a car wash, the team helps a guy who's been caught in one of the huge brushes. Buck calls them in to show the video of the guy sprayed by a hose and backing up into the brush, which then spun him around, laughing wildly. At first, Bobby and Hen tell him this could have been dangerous but within moments, they too are hunched over in hysterical laughter.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: A Truth in Television example occurs during “Under Pressure”, when Athena is dispatched to a disorder at a local store. The owner has started jacking up the price of necessities in response to the earthquake and Athena is quick to point out that Price Gouging is illegal. Faced with legal consequences for his actions, the owner relents and gives everyone a 50 percent discount.
• Afraid of Needles: Bobby has a huge phobia of needles, as shown in "Karma's a Bitch". Ironically, his blood has a unique makeup which can be used to treat pregnant women and their fetuses with Rhesus Disease.
• Age-Gap Romance: There is a 16-year age gap between Abby and Buck.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Hen is revealed to be this in her backstory episode when she first joined the fire department, due to her minority status (one of only three female graduates). She had to deal with a sexist Jerkass captain that forced her to cook and clean up after the unit, while the other members were too afraid of said captain to do anything. The only one who treated her with any open respect was Chimney, which perfectly explains why the two are so close to this day.
• Always on Duty: Averted, if only through passing references. Like real firehouses, Firehouse 118 has several different crews that man the trucks at different times. The main characters are seen leaving at the end of their shifts and there are other unnamed firefighters seen throughout the fire house.
• Ambition Is Evil:
  • Defied. Athena applied for promotion to lieutenant several times pre-series, only stopping when her previous captain made it clear that as a woman, sergeant was as high as she was getting. When her new captain offers her a lieutenant's position, everyone encourages her to take it. Her refusal frames Athena now viewing personal satisfaction and maternal responsibilities as higher priorities than ambition, not better ones.
  • Also averted with Taylor Kelly when she profiles the firehouse for a TV piece after they rescue her from a downed helicopter. The 118 are annoyed with her presence, but no one blames her for taking advantage of her brush with death in order to advance her career.
• Amicable Exes: Athena and her ex-husband Michael become this almost immediately after their divorce. Michael encourages her relationship with Bobby, and when he finally meets Bobby the first thing he does is invite him to dinner with the family. Athena grows to like Michael's first boyfriend Glen, bonding with him over dinner, and later when Michael asks for the family's blessing to propose to later boyfriend Daniel, Athena approves and helps him pick out an outfit for the occasion.
• And Starring:
  • Season 1’s first and last spots always remained the same starting with Angela Bassett and ending with "and Connie Britton".
  • Season 2’s first spot remains Angela Bassett but the “with” is dropped completely.
• Artistic License – Law: Athena and the detective in charge after Chimney gets stabbed by Maddie's abusive ex say that anything found on Chimney's phone (after Buck unlocked it by using the unconscious Chim's thumbprint) cannot be used against the ex. Except the "fruit of the poisonous tree" exception applies only to the rights of the accused, not the victim. The cops could use anything on the phone against the ex.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • Proper EMS procedures, patient assessments, and even basic bleeding control are not something you will find on this series, which frequently portrays its characters as heroic for doing things that would actually get them fired, send them to prison, and/or kill their patients.
  • A notable one during "Hero Complex" is Jonah stopping Chimney's heart and then restarting the rhythm using defibrillator twice. However, indication to use defibrillator is on patients with PEA (Pulseless Electrical Activity) like Ventricular Tachycardia and Ventricular Fibrillation and Chimney's ECG reading before Jonah use the defibrillator shows an asystole. But hey, flatlining is more dramatic than a bunch of incoherent waves on the screen.
  • Hen's bedside exam in "Home Invasion." Medical instructors usually discuss medical students' findings in a separate room in order to prevent others from hearing about the patients' personal condition, preventing ethical and legal conflicts that may arise from talking about it in the open.
  • Hen intubating a patient bleeding from the mouth in Tomorrow has several basic mistakes; Not using the stylet on the first try and the lack of stethoscope to confirm if the tube was properly inserted to trachea. This warrants a mention because her years of experience aside, Hen's supposed to aspire to be a surgeon and intubation is one of the basic skills aspiring surgeons should know by heart.
  • Buck telling Hen that he's "keeping the tank full" to ensure that the sperm donation is a success in "Cursed" is, despite Buck's claim to research a lot beforehand, in fact incorrect. A simple Google search shows that most sperm donation banks recommend abstaining from ejaculating at only 48-72 hours (European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology) or 2-7 days (WHO) prior to appointment. It was likely that the writer make Buck's understanding of sperm speciment that way^note  Buck having formerly proclaimed himself a sex addict so that the writer can make a joke about Buck not being able to masturbate for four weeks when the episode airs around the beginning of November, a month internet make a meme of with "No Nut November" challenge. Hen, despite having studied medicine, of course doesn't correct Buck on the misconception.
• Artistic License – Physics: The roller coaster in "Let Go" not only manages to randomly stop at the top of a loop, but the shown loop is also taller than the coaster's lifthill. The train would have never been able to get up there in the first place, and if it ran out of momentum would roll back down. Coasters don't stop at the top of a loop without further defects causing them to get stuck.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: The waste truck fire in "Fallout" has some standout moments. Alpha and Gamma are used to refer to levels of background radiation despite those being types of radiation. Additionally, the Cobalt-60 undergoes a combination of Beta and Gamma decay - there is no Alpha radiation involved.
• Artistic License – Law: "Let Go" has a coaster with a simple lap-restraint for both passengers in one car, which has a single "closed" position. This category of restraint is only allowed on thrill rides with fairly low forces. A rider can't be ejected from those rides the way it is shown in the episode, and the coaster wouldn't be allowed to go upside down (the loop it has in the episode doesn't exist on the ride they filmed at).
• Artistic License – Sports: In "Malfunction," Bobby mentions having been a Twin Cities junior pairs champion, complete with flashback. However, to compete in the junior division, you have to be 13 to 19, plus junior pairs teams have to perform lifts, which invariably means the male partners skew older. The kids shown in flashback were far too young for that to be plausible; they're old enough for juvenile at best. Furthermore, competing at the junior level takes serious dedication; the time commitments for competitive skating and hockey are strenuous enough that doing both is an option only if you don't sleep.
• Ascended Extra:
  • May Grant was a recurring character in Season 1, but was promoted to the main cast for Season 2.
  • Harry Grant was a recurring character in Season 1, but was promoted to the main cast for Season 2.
  • Christopher Diaz was a recurring character in Season 2, but was promoted to the main cast for Season 3.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Ted in "Heartbreaker" was a cheating douchebag, but being mutilated to death and being stuck back together with Superglue was a little too much.
  • The Dentist in "Karma's A Bitch" ends up being mauled to death by an escaped tiger. Not only did he taunt the animal, but he was also a big-game hunter despised for killing a much-loved lion. While cleaning up his remains, the crew jokes that public opinion will probably be on the tiger's side.
  • The Obnoxious Entitled Housewife from "9-1-1, What's Your Grievance?" who was shot while making a 911 call had previously poisoned one of her neighbors' pets, and was overall so unpleasant that nobody shed any tears over her death. Athena even struggled with calling her a victim.
  • The sexually harassing boss from "Under Pressure", who greets his female senior employee in a bathrobe and proposes they shower together, then warns her that the company's HR committee are all his cronies when she rightly threatens to report him. The earthquake dumps him sprawled onto a tilted window hundreds of feet in the air, where he gets to watch one Ominous Crack after another spread out beneath him, before an aftershock shatters the glass and sends him plummeting to his death. The scene also deconstructs this trope as the guy pleads with the firefighters to save him, telling them that just because he is an asshole, it does not mean that he deserves to die like this.
  • In "Suspicion", Eddie discovers that a woman he and the team rescued from nearly falling through her balcony has been making her son Charlie sick with eyedrops to garner sympathy and monetary donations from people. However, just when he and the team realize this, Charlie, who was aware all along that she was putting eye drops in his food, curiously puts those said drops in her food to see what would happen. She almost dies from tetrahydrozoline poisoning. When the cops and firefighters figure out what happened, they have no sympathy for the woman and feel that the son was fully justified in what he did.
  Chimney: [on the phone with Maddie about what happened] You know, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad she fell through that balcony floor. At least that kid will be safe, far away from her.
• The Atoner:
  • Bobby and his notebook in Season 1. After an on-the-job injury, he became addicted to painkillers and alcohol. One night when he was too stoned to keep an eye on it, his space heater malfunctioned and started a fire that consumed the apartment building. It ended up killing over a hundred people, including his wife and young children. Bobby keeps track of the lives he saves on the job, trying to balance the two numbers...so he can finally kill himself..
• Auto Erotica: Buck 1.0 had a habit of taking out the fire truck to hook up in.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: In "First Responders", Josh from the call center remotely shepherds multiple police officers through a massive maze of shipping containers at night, allowing them to corner and apprehend the kidnapper whose car ran down Sue. As no helicopter can make it in time, he maps out their relative locations using just the containers' numbers, entirely in his head.
• Ax-Crazy: Melora in"Heartbreaker", complete with actual axe.
• Badass Family:
  • Bobby is a fourth generation firefighter, who is married to a cop, and his stepdaughter was a 9-1-1 dispatcher.
  • The Buckley-Han family has two firefighters, a former firefighter, a 9-1-1 dispatcher, and Chimney's foster brother was a firefighter who died in the line of duty.
  • Lucy is the sole firefighter in a family of cops.
• Balancing Death's Books: Bobby was attempting to save the same number of people as died in an apartment fire he started before killing himself. He has since moved on from this plan.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted in "Powerless" when Athena goes up against a serial rapist. During the fight, she gets severely beaten and her arm broken before she is able to subdue him.
• Berserk Button:
  • Buildings not up to safety codes are a huge trigger for Bobby. Fitting, since his old apartment building wasn't up to code and if it was, his family might've lived.
  • When Chimney and Buck decorate Maddie's apartment for Christmas she freaks and kicks them out. At the end of the episode, it's shown that Maddie's husband beat her particularly bad for decorating wrong for Christmas the previous year, with him telling her she'd "get it right next year".
• Big Damn Kiss: In “Fight or Flight”, between Maddie and Chimney.
  • In Season 7 episode 4 between Buck and Tommy.
• Big Disaster Plot:
  • Season 2 opened with an earthquake hitting Los Angeles and the first responders dealing with the fallout of the deadly aftershocks over 3 episodes.
  • Season 3 opened with a tsunami hitting the Santa Monica Pier and the aftermath is dealt with over 3 episodes.
  • Season 4 opened with a dam break that caused a mudslide. The aftermath is instead dealt with for only 1 episode.
  • Season 5 opened with a city-wide blackout caused by ransomware hackers that mess with electronics all across Los Angeles. The blackout is dealt with over 3 episodes.
  • Season 6 opened with a bimp crash in a crowded stadium, however the main focus is Athena and Bobby solving a cold murder case.
  • Season 7 opened with Bobby and Athena's honeymoon cruise from heck.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Subverted in "Blindsided." Maddie gives birth to her and Chimney’s daughter at the same time Albert seems to be flatlining in the aftermath of a serious car crash. However, Albert pulls through and survives his injuries.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Maddie's coworker Gloria seems to have it all figured out. Even offers her a muffin. Then we see her reject call after call with rude, insensitive, and even racist remarks.
  Gloria: If you were really going to jump, I doubt you'd be calling me.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Season 2 finale has this. Chimney and Maddie finally get together, while Athena and Bobby get married at city hall. However, Buck still has major injuries from the fire truck landing on him, and the doctors say he might not be able to work again. This practically sends Buck into a downward spiral, since he believes he's nothing if he's not a firefighter.
• Black Gal on White Guy Drama: Mild case. Athena's mother doesn't approve of Athena dating Bobby, but then again, she doesn't seem to approve much of anything Athena does. Her father is more accepting, but is drowned out by his wife.
• Boom, Headshot!: In "Full Moon (Creepy AF)", Athena does this to a man who was eating someone's face when tasing him didn't work.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: It's safe to say that with how awful some of the main casts' parents are, they turn out great in this department. They still express doubt because of their upbringing from time to time, but they make good effort to be better.
  • Chimney's father left him to go to South Korea. When Maddie runs away because of her post-partum depression, he makes sure he's there for Jee-Yun while looking for her.
  • Maddie is implied to inherits the Buckley parents' depression trait. Unlike her parents, she tries to get help for herself, eventually comes back, and tries to be emotionally present for her daughter's remaining milestone development.
  • Ramon Diaz's work at oil rig makes him generally absent for a lot of his children's lives. He also instills toxic masculinity mindset on Eddie becoming "the man of the house." Helena Diaz is more verbally abusive by belittling Eddie's parenting choice and the guilt-trip after Shannon's death. While Eddie initially falls for the same trap by going on tour twice for the first 6 years of Christopher's lives, he eventually gets better with prioritizing his son and generally be uplifting for him.
  • Buck's childhood is filled with emotional neglect. He's now a kid-loving guy and is a great parental figure for Christopher.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Carla, Abby's mother's nurse, understandably left after her mother's death and Abby leaving for Ireland. She later comes back to help Eddie through red tape of getting his son childcare.
  • The woman that broke her femur while stealing packages is now committing insurance fraud after suing the family that lived on the property where she collapsed.
  • Abby herself makes an appearance in "What's Next?", allowing Buck to finally get closure on his relationship.
• The Caretaker:
  • Abby is this to her sick mother, who has Alzheimer's.
  • Abby also has an unreliable nurse that watches her mother while she is at work. This nurse only stays for the “Pilot” before she is replaced with Carla.
  • Carla takes over as Abby’s mother’s main day nurse. She is very good at her job.
    • Carla also becomes this towards Christopher Diaz.
• Character Death:
  • Patricia Clark dies in her sleep from a pulmonary embolism in "A Whole New You".
  • Doug Kendall is killed by Maddie in self defense in "Fight or Flight".
  • Shannon Diaz is hit by a car and dies from her injuries in "Careful What You Wish For".
  • Claudette Collins dies from cardiac arrest after being rescued from the burning 911 center building. This despite being mostly okay aside from smoke inhalation when she was brought out of the building, which Hen finds suspicious.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The man in “Let Go” who reported being attacked by rabid dogs hits on and leaves his number with Athena. She is able to use this to track him down and arrest him when it’s discovered that he was actually robbing the place when he was attacked.
• Cheerful Child: Eddie's son, Christopher, who is always positive and never seen without a smile on his face. It's the main reason Buck admires him so much.
• Christianity is Catholic: Played straight and averted. Bobby is a devout Catholic, while Athena, Michael, and their kids are Baptists. This is even brought up by Athena when Bobby notices her discomfort in his church in "A Whole New You".
  Athena: I'm Baptist. We don't go to church; we do church.
• Christmas Episode: Has had one in seasons 2 ("Merry Ex-Mas") and 3 ("Christmas Spirit").
• Coincidental Broadcast: In “Let Go”, as Abby is getting ready for work, the news she was watching shows an interview with Buck after the roller coaster accident. This gives Abby her first look at Buck, as she had only spoken to him over the phone in the previous episode.
  • Happens again later in the episode. Abby is speaking with Carla when Buck appears on the news again, his interview having gone national. Carla then convinces Abby to get into contact with Buck.
  • The mosquito outbreak Taylor reports on in "Dosed" is referenced as a potential contributing factor behind the Bat Scare incident in the next episode, "Haunted".
• Confessional: Bobby goes to confessional once a week, to remind himself how easy it would be to fall back down the wrong path.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: While trapped atop a firetruck after the tsunami, Buck and Christopher play "I Spy" to pass the time. When a dead body floats by, Buck uses the game to discreetly turn Chris around and keep him from seeing it.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Inverted. Often the characters perform it for about 20 seconds, then give up. When it is played straight for the woman whose heart stopped after giving birth on a lobby floor, the crew themselves are boggled and call it a miracle.
• Crime After Crime: This is lampshaded by Athena in "Under Pressure" when she arrests a teenaged car thief. The kid claims that he was just joyriding and since he is a minor, he will get a slap on the wrist from a judge. Athena tells him that he made the mistake of running from the cops and leading them on a high speed chase through a residential neighborhood. By doing so, he raked up a number of serious felonies on top of the original joy riding charge.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • In “Let Go” a man is flung from a moving roller coaster and he dies as soon as he hits the ground.
• Cure Your Gays: Michael married Athena in belief their marriage will "fix" him. Obviously, it didn't work, as they get a divorce at the beginning of the first season and he had begun dating even before that.
• Cut-and-Paste Suburb: In the “Pilot”, Athena has trouble locating a little girl who is trapped in her house while men are breaking in, due to all the houses looking exactly the same.
  Athena: I'm in Stephen Spielberg Land.
• Death Seeker: Bobby intended to kill himself once he'd met his quota of lives saved. He eventually abandons this idea, accepting that he should go on living.
• Deadpan Snarker: Honestly, it would be easier to say who isn't.
• Determinator: Most of the characters.
  • Maddie is a good example. After managing to subdue Doug (to the point where he is next seen in a body bag), she manages to get up and keep walking until Buck finds her and she's taken to the hospital.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • In the “Pilot”, to rescue a baby that is stuck in the toilet pipes, Buck was planning to smash the wall with the fire axe. Bobby stops him before he can, saying that he could have hit the baby and tells him to go get the saw.
    • The teen mother of the aforementioned baby didn’t really think of the aftermath of her decision to not tell anyone about her pregnancy and having her on a toilet. This results in the baby getting stuck in the pipes and nearly dying, as well as herself nearly bleeding out, due to not getting any medical care.
  • After been written up and warned by Bobby in the “Pilot” about using the firetruck to hook up, Buck still gets caught having sex on a roof top - having used the firetruck’s ladder to get up top, Bobby has no choice but to fire Buck. He is rehired at the end of the episode after helping to rescue a trapped little girl with Athena.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • When Hen's ex, Eva, tries to get custody of Denny (who is her biological son), she brings Denny's father, a former drug addict who had since turned his life around and had no idea he even had a son. Of course, Eva broke her parole orders and doesn't get custody. While he does want visitation, he is more than willing to go along with what Hen and Karen want.
  • On some level, Eddie was this to Christopher in his early years. Eddie signed up to another tour of Afghanistan when he was overwhelmed by his son's disability. As a result, Chris was raised by Shannon and Eddie's parents.
• Distinguishing Mark: Buck has a birthmark over his left eye.
• The Dog Bites Back: Maddie kills Doug in self-defense.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: In "The Taking Of Dispatch 9-1-1", it's revealed that Tiffany, the supposedly meek driver of the gang of thieves, was actually the one who put the entire thing together, expertly covering her identity so the gang had no idea she was really the boss and working a secondary plan with her lover to let the gang take the fall while they got away with the loot.
• Double Standard: In-Universe. Eddie points out to Buck that when he signed up for another tour of Afghanistan when overwhelmed by his son's disability, Eddie is seen as a hero, while his wife Shannon is seen as a terrible person by his family for leaving, due to her own overwhelming feelings.
• Dramatic Drop: "Blind Norman" drops the food he just purchased at a lunch truck when he realizes the deranged woman whose antics on the overpass have created the traffic jam he and the truck are stuck in is his own wife.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Bobby is unable to stop a woman from leaping to her death in the “Pilot”.
  • Bobby himself was this after the apartment building fire he inadvertently started killed his family. He planned on saving 149 people at the job to atone for the 149 people killed by that fire, then kill himself to join his family.
  • After agonizing over failing to save a victim stuck on a broken roller coaster in “Let Go”, Buck learns the young man had already been suicidal before and likely chose to die.
  • At the end of “Let Go”, Athena's daughter, May, attempts suicide due to bullying via pills. She gets better and later episodes show her as more well-adjusted.
• The Dutiful Son: Abby takes care of her mother, who has Alzheimer's, while her younger brother suggests putting her in a specialized care home, though this is more out of concern for his sister's well-being than any responsibility on his part. Abby refuses.
• Eager Rookie: In season 1, Buck is the newest recruit of the 118 fire station and is plenty gung-ho to prove himself, even if it means putting his life in several risky situations.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Connor, the man who asks Buck to be a sperm donor for his wife in "Animal Instincts", is a nameless character who talks to and asks Buck to come join him to LA when Buck is bartendering in Peru during "Buck Begins."
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season is much different in tone than the rest, being more low-key and serious (there are no major disasters to open or close with, instead going with day-to-day rescues) and the dysfunctions of the main cast's lives being played up more. It is also filmed differently, going for a Real Is Brown filter rather than the brighter tones used in season two onwards, and Maddie and Eddie are yet to be introduced, making their absences very notable on rewatch.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Maddie’s story in Season 2, hands down. After spending most of the season hiding in fear of her ex-husband, she finally stands up against him and kills him, allowing her to truly start again with a new love, in the form of Chimney.
• Easily Forgiven: Except for Bobby and Eddie, the rest of the 118 have forgiven Buck by the time of the next episode after he sues the city for wrongful termination after Bobby didn't reinstate Buck due to blood thinner medication being a liability and Buck's lawyer took information from the 118's personal lives to be used against them.
• Emergency Services: One of the most comprehensive treatments of this trope, incorporating police, fire services (both firefighters and paramedics), and 911 dispatch workers.
• Engineered Heroics: In the aptly titled "Hero Complex." Suspicious over a patient dying under the care of new paramedic Jonah, Hen and Chimney discover a pattern of Jonah's patients near death and saved. It seems as a kid, Jonah saved the life of his school bus driver and hailed for heroism which pushed him to become a paramedic. But Jonah took the wrong lessons as rather than do this to help people, he gets off on the accolades of others. The paramedics realize that Jonah is now deliberately putting patients at risk just so he can look better "saving" them. Sadly, he overestimates his skills with several of these victims dying when they didn't need to.
• Ensemble Cast: There's no single protagonist.
• Exact Words: Bobby tries to convince a car dealer owner hosting a touch-a-car contest to stop the competition and let his two participants be treated because of acute kidney failure due to dehydration, but the owner won't budge and the contestants are adamant in staying in place. Bobby then says that since the rules dictate the contestant has to put one hand in any part of the vehicle to participate, he decides to saw a part of the car and then bring them to the hospital. Before any of them can actually saw up the car, the owner declares both contestants winners, and they're both last seen taken away in ambulances holding car keys.
• Experienced Protagonist:
  • Bobby has been a firefighter/captain for numerous years before the show starts.
  • Athena has been on the police force for over 30 years.
• Failsafe Failure: High rise buildings in Los Angeles are built to survive major earthquakes. However, a hotel is too close to the fault line and there is structural failure in the underground parking garage which causes the building to partially collapse. The hotel is still built well enough that it keeps standing even after two aftershocks, which gives the firefighters time to rescue the trapped survivors.
• Family of Choice: The 118 is this for Buck. Eventually, all of them become this to each other.
• Felony Murder: A thief tries to create a distraction by knocking out a security guard with "non-lethal" scorpion venom. The guard turns out to be allergic and dies. The thief ends up with a murder charge.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Initially, Buck and Eddie get off on the wrong foot, with Buck seemingly jealous of how easy Eddie seems to be fitting in with the 118. However, following a call where they have to pull a live grenade round out of a man's leg, they become best friends, to the point that Eddie lists Buck as Christopher's official guardian, just in case something bad happens to him on the job.
• Firing Day: After not following the rules one too many times, Bobby has no choice but to fire Buck in the “Pilot”. He is rehired by the end of the episode.
• Firemen Are Hot: The whole firehouse cast is attractive, with extra points to Buck and Eddie who attract this response In-Universe.
  • In a Freeze-Frame Bonus in "This Life We Choose," you can see the comments in the live video of the beauty blogger the team is working on shift from giving her well wishes to gushing over how hot Buck and Eddie are.
• Friend to All Living Things: Hen. If there's an animal involved, she'll know how to treat it and does her best to ensure they're cared for as well.
• "Friends" Rent Control: Averted for the most part:
  • Bobby and Eddie have small apartments befitting public servants.
  • Hen and Athena have spacious houses, but their current or former spouses have high-earning careers.
  • Chimney is implied to come from a wealthy family, and possibly has family money to supplement his salary.
  • Buck and Maddie, however, buy extremely nice, spacious apartments despite being public servants, one of whom had to flee her marriage, and presumably her savings. Possibly justified after Maddie received the proceeds of Doug's estate, worth several hundred thousand dollars.
• Foreshadowing: In “Let Go”, May being “sick” and not wanting to go to school plus the lack of communication between her and her family are all signs that something else is going on with her. It's later revealed that she is being bullied at school.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Bobby and Athena go on a date at the end of "A Whole New You", get engaged at "Merry Ex-Mas", and marry in "This Life We Choose".
• Funny Background Event: While Athena is writing her report in “Let Go”, dealing with the rabid dog attack, Chimney can be seen cringing badly as animal control leads the dogs into the back of their van.
  • In "Dosed", as a high Hen greets Athena at the tot pageant, Eddie is "attacked" by balloons in the background.
• Gentle Giant:
  • The guy that takes Abby's mother to the hospital in "Point of Origin" is a tough-looking biker guy and is at least a head taller than Abby.
  • Buck also counts. He's the tallest member of the team, but he's extremely sweet-natured and good with kids.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: The tsunami in the eponymous story arc in season 3.
  • Also the rogue wave in the cruise ship arc of season 7.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Buck is initially very jealous of the addition of Eddie to the 118 in "Under Pressure", due to the ease that Eddie fits in with the rest of the crew.
  • He also gets jealous of Eddie and Tommy becoming closer in "Buck, Bothered and Bewildered."
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Buck might be a dumbass on occasion, but his heart is always in the right place. Athena even mentions his heart of gold by name.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: This happens to an unlucky motorcyclist in "A Whole New You", when a truck t-bones another car...with him in-between the two vehicles. It's played for the full horror, with the crew arriving to a gruesome scene, only to learn the victim is still alive and doesn't realize what has happened to him. Bobby manages to keep it together long enough to help the dying man talk to his son on the phone, but then has to step away from the scene to compose himself.
• Halloween Episode: Has had one in seasons 2 ("Haunted") and 3 ("Monsters").
• Handicapped Badass: Captain Cooper of Station 136 went back to working as a fire captain after having his left arm amputated.
• Heist Episode: Played With in the episode "Ocean's 9-1-1", where the first responder protagonists are accused of robbing a bank during the very emergency they were sent to control. Multiple homages to the Ocean's franchise are present as the cast tries to unravel what exactly transpired.
• He's Back!: After suffering numerous setbacks from his injuries he received in "This Life We Choose" Buck finally returns to work as a firefighter in “Monsters”.
• Help, I'm Stuck!: A baby’s cries in the “Pilot” are heard through the walls of an apartment, alerting the tenant that it is stuck in the pipes.
• Heroic BSoD: Buck suffers from one after he loses his first patient on the job in “Let Go”. He is unable to do the more dangerous rescues until he has a heart-to-heart with Bobby. By the end of the episode, he is working through it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Chimney's friend Kevin dies on a call at a burning building. On the rooftop, a pregnant woman is about to fall through into the inferno until Kevin pushes her out of the way, leading him to burn to death.
• High Turnover Rate: Before Bobby took over as captain, the company had six captains in two years. According to Hen, the Fire Department brass used the 118 as a dumping ground for problematic officers close to retirement.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The bride in "Under Pressure" reports her groom's car stolen after he leaves her at the altar. Athena arrests her for filing a false report.
  • Psychotic killer Jeffrey Hudson steals a cop's badge and is caught on video claiming to be one. Athena chases him to a "police-free zone" of the city where she talks of how "an animal with a badge" is on the loose." It takes little time for the residents to identify this "cop" for Athena to chase into a trap.
• Hold the Line: Non-combat example in "Defend In Place", when the 118 and other crews valiantly fend off the inferno at the hospital, buying David another 12 minutes to complete a surgery in progress.
• Hollywood California: Specifically, the show spans across the rural and urban parts of Los Angeles.
• Hollywood Driving: The truck driver in "Fallout" is telling his trainee about the nuclear waste in the truck and does so by looking away from the road. This ends in him crashing the truck.
• Hollywood Heart Attack: In "Heartbreaker", one man thought it would be romantic to fake a plane emergency to propose to his girlfriend. The stress she gets from both situations leads her to having a heart attack.
• Hypocrite: Josh reprimands Eddie when Eddie hijacks Linda's call in "Outside Looking In." Josh's harsh tone comes from Eddie not being an actual dispatcher, which is understandable. However, he picked Claudette's side when May came at Josh talking about Claudette hijacking her call in "Peer Pressure."
  • Buck talks about how a relationship where one doesn't commit to it sucks since he was in the same situation with Abby and is quite bitter when Eddie tells him Ana is the first woman he wants to spend time with since Shannon in "Desperate Times", but then uses similar wording to Taylor by saying the relationship was the most functional he has, cheats on her by kissing someone he just meet (even though being drunk may contribute to this), and instead of following Hen's final advice to tell her, Buck instead asks her to move in.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: How Maddie got into Buck's apartment after three years of estrangement.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most episode titles, from Season 2 onwards, are from a piece of dialogue spoken within the episode.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Out of all the rescues the 118 crew perform, children tend to survive while not all of the adults do.
  • In the “Pilot”, a young boy that drowns in a pool is resuscitated.
  • In the “Pilot”, a baby that was born on a toilet, flushed, and got stuck in an apartment building's pipes is safely rescued.
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Eddie's son Christopher has Cerebral Palsy and walks with crutches. That being said, he is mostly seen as a happy kid that the team takes to immediately. Buck even tells him that his positivity despite his condition is one of the things he loves and admires the most about Chris. Deconstructed when Christopher tries skateboarding, gets hurt, and starts coming to terms with the fact that he has limitations the other kids don't.
• Insult to Rocks: Eddie's aunt uses this trope to describe her first marriage.
  Pepa: I would say it was a trainwreck, but that wouldn't be very nice to trainwrecks.
• Interrupted Intimacy: Seems to happen to Buck a lot.
  • It also happens to the couple atop the fire engine in the episode "What's Your Fantasy?" when one of them falls off the engine.
  • In the “Pilot”, Bobby catches Buck on a roof top with one of his hookups, just before they have sex.
  • In one episode, May, having moved into her own apartment, returns to the family house to pick up her mail only to find Athena and Bobby about to begin roleplay sex, which includes Athena in Bobby's firemen jacket and Bobby in only a chef's apron.
• Intoxication Ensues: The firefighters regularly receive baked goods from the public. In "Dosed", someone slips some LSD in their brownies...and Hilarity Ensues.
• It's All About Me:
  • Athena's mother is furious because of the fact that Athena didn't tell her that May attempted suicide, and expresses constant disappointment that Athena didn't follow life according to her plans.
  • Buck and Maddie's mother justifies not visiting her children after their various ordeals, like Maddie getting kidnapped by her ex-husband or Buck getting crushed by a ladder truck, by saying how hard it is for her to see her children in the hospital. After the middle Buckley sibling, Daniel, died, Margaret denied her husband any mementos of their lost son, didn't give Maddie any opportunity to grieve for her little brother, and generally acted like she was the only person who lost him.
• It's All My Fault: Buck realizes in the “Pilot” that getting fired was completely his own fault. Hen agrees with him and tells him that everyone in the station thinks that, too. Luckily he is able to fix it.
• It's Not You, It's Me: Buck says this to Abby when she asks him out on a date in “Let Go”. He has come to realize that he has issues when it comes to intimacy and doesn't want to ruin the blossoming romance between the two of them by sleeping with her on the first date. They decide to keep talking together on the phone, like the olden days.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Hen's classmate Sydney tells Hen that she will probably quit med school because she already has a family and a career. In the end, that is exactly what happens.
• Journey to Find Oneself: Abby is on one post-season one. The drama comes not from her trip, but her left-behind boyfriend Buck, as they are still together, but the time and distance are taking a serious toll, as well as forcing Buck to do all of the emotional work.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Chimney's girlfriend didn't love him, he gets into a car crash, and winds up with rebar through his head. Even though he makes a full recovery, he later finds out that said girlfriend has since moved on and is already pregnant, despite her claims of not wanting to settle down with him. And in the mid-season 2 premiere, he also gets stabbed in the gut by Maddie's estranged husband, and his new "friend," Doug.
  • Athena's mother tells Bobby, who lost his family in a fire, that her grandkids are not his "consolation prize".
• Kinky Cuffs: Athena and her new lover are getting hot and heavy and he decides to spice it up by cuffing her to the bedposts...only to accidentally cuff them both. Athena has to secretly call Abby to call Hen ("911 is the only number I know!") and Hen bursts out laughing at the sight. Athena then tells her to bring the key over, with Hen just leaving it in arm's reach and taking a selfie to tease Athena.
  • In a later episode, Athena teases Bobby with her handcuffs again over cards.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • The entire point of "Karma's A Bitch" as various folks who did some bad things are hit by ironic fates with the team thrown by how utterly bizarre it all is:
    • A woman tries to shoot her abusive husband, but misses and the bullet gets stuck in a tree. The woman then hangs herself from that tree and her husband doesn't even care that he drove her to do it. He tries to blow up the tree later on...and the explosion causes the bullet to fly out and hit him in the chest.
    • A beauty spa owner left his dog inside a hot car and fired an assistant for breaking her out. The next day, that assistant comes in to pick up her last paycheck and finds the guy almost charred alive when his tanning bed broke.
    • A woman steals packages from the doors of people right after they've been delivered. She ends up falling and breaking her femur trying to carry one large package away and is arrested by Athena while lying in pain.
    • She returns in “Awful People”, and now has turned to committing insurance fraud (ie. faking accidents). She is about to commit another incident before her planned target accidentally runs her over.
    • A dentist becomes hated for killing a lion during a safari trip. He ends up being mauled by a tiger at a zoo, after he threw items at it in order to get a photo.
    • It's mentioned that the team handled a guy off-screen who robbed a store and was hit by a truck as he fled.
  • In "Fight or Flight", Doug, after spending the entire episode practically torturing Maddie, gets stabbed to death by Maddie, determined not to let him kill her.
  • In "The New Abnormal", a man tells Blatant Lies about how he did not metaphorically "throw his female coworker under the bus" during an important business meeting. Seconds later a freak accident causes a city bus to crush into the building and the man is trapped under it.
  • In "Dumb Luck," a man parks his car in a parking space for disabled driver. Not only he gets stuck in a charity box all day, his car also goes missing after he gets out from Hen and Bobby's help.
    • A bicyclist was intentionally obstructing traffic just to be a pain in the ass. She put a sign on the back of her bicycle that said "Share the road" and would yell at vehicles stuck behind her "Read the sign!" She got impaled by a stop sign which fell off a truck trying to go around her.
    • Also, some punks steal stop signs for pranks. Athena catches them in the act, one kid running...and is hit by a car whose driver didn't stop because he couldn't see the stop sign the pair had just stolen.
• Late Coming Out:
  • After decades of marriage and kids, Michael comes out to his wife and children.
  • Downplayed with Buck, who's in his early thirties when he realizes he's bisexual.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Averted with Bobby, who seems to be the one that does most of the cooking at the station.
  • Played straight with Eddie. Even his son jokes that he can’t cook very well.
• Lethally Stupid: Couple punks start stealing stop signs for a prank. This is extremely dangerous and could cause multiple car accidents. They are hit with Laser-Guided Karma when one of them tries to run from the police and is hit by a car whose driver failed to stop because there was no stop sign. In an earlier incident the thieves failed to secure the stolen signs in the back of their pick up truck and one of them flew out and seriously injured a woman.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: In the three-part Season 2 earthquake story arc, a high school basketball star's leg is pinned by debris in the half-toppled hotel. The rescuers leave it up to him to decide if they should bring in a surgeon to amputate his limb or risk lifting the debris - which could collapse the ceiling on top of him - to extract it intact. He opts to take the chance, afraid that living with the knowledge he could have saved his leg would be worse than dying.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: In the episode "Dosed", the fire station receives baked goods given by the community as thank-you gifts. One day Chimney notices a new package of brownies only to find out the other firefighters have already eaten them all. Then when the 118 are out on a call all of them except Chimney start acting high because it turns out those brownies were laced with LSD, obviously a very dangerous situation in their line of work, making it this trope for both Chimney and the injured victim and civilians at the scene that he never got any.
• Lovable Jock: This is what happens to Buck after high school.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Deconstructed. While Buck is well-liked by everyone, his antics end up crossing the line into unprofessional and gets himself fired, with a recommendation from Athena (plus his heroics that day) being the only reason he gets rehired. It serves as a wake-up call that he needs to address his problems.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places:
  • In the “Pilot”, while on duty, Buck takes out the fire truck and hooks up with a woman.
    • In the same episode, Bobby catches him making out with a snake owner the team previously rescued.
  • In "What's Your Fantasy?" A young couple sneak atop the fire engine to have sex. When one of them falls off and injures themselves, the team points out how stupid of an idea that is.
• Mama Bear:
  • Athena, big time. When her daughter nearly kills herself because of bullying, she hunts down the tormentor at a house party, makes it clear who she is, and arrests her for drug use. When the girl's parents rip into her, Athena stands up on how they "failed her." Expect her to fill in this role when there's any child in danger.
  • Hen, too, upon finding the girl that was separated from her family during the earthquake.
• matchmaker.com:
  • Buck 1.0 uses an app version of this for his hookups.
  • Chimney met his girlfriend on a dating site just for cops and firefighters.
• May–December Romance: A reversed example between Buck and Abby, as Abby is the older one of the partnership. They make it work for a while.
• Mid Life Crisis Motorcycle: In "A Whole New You", a call comes in about a man who bought one of these, only to, after being distracted by the flirtations of a cute girl, get torn in two. He survives long enough to tell his son he loves him one last time.
• Mission Control: As a 9-1-1 operator, Abby does what one would expect out of the job: finding out the source of the emergency and distributing the information to the appropriate first responder. However, there are times where a situation may ask more of her assistance than usual.
• Mistaken for Gay: When Buck tags along with Eddie so Christopher can get a picture with Santa, one of the elf workers tells Buck that he and Eddie have an adorable son. Buck doesn't correct her and happily skips away instead after thanking her.
  • In a Freeze-Frame Bonus in "This Life We Choose," you can see the comments to the live video of the beauty blogger the team is working on shift from worrying about her to "they [Eddie and Buck] are so cute together" and "those two should TOTALLY be a couple!"
• Multipart Episode:
  • Season 2 has a three-parter with "Under Pressure", "7.1", and "Help Is Not Coming".
  • Season 3 has a three-parter with "Kids Today", "Sink or Swim", and "The Searchers".
  • Season 4 has a two-parter with "The New Abnormal" and "Alone Together".
    • Season 4 also has "Suspicion" and "Survivors" .
• Münchausen's by Proxy: "Suspicion" deals with this. After the 118 rescue a mother, Shelia, that has fallen halfway through her balcony’s floor she needs to be taken to the hospital but she is unwilling to leave her sickly son, Charlie, who is suffering from an unnamed autoimmune disease. Eddie volunteers to stay with her son until she comes home. Upon staying in the apartment, Eddie learns that Shelia and Charlie are always moving and are never in the same state for long and Charlie never sees the same doctor. Eddie also discovers a large amount of unopened eye drop bottles kept in the cupboard. Later that night it is uncovered that Shelia has set up numerous GoFundMe pages asking for donations for her "sick" son. Each page has the same first names and pictures, but have different last names and are from different states. Numerous comments on the pages accuse Shelia of being a fraud and warn that she is swindling money out of people. Eddie works out that Shelia has been putting the eye drops into Charlie’s food everyday, not enough to kill him but just enough to make him appear sick. Charlie calls Eddie and he tells him that he’s put the eye drops into Shelia’s food because he wanted to see what would happen, as she has told him that the drop were just vitamins. Charlie is afraid that he accidently killed his mother. Eddie, Buck, and some of the other paramedics arrive in time to save Shelia and get Charlie the help he needs – right before Eddie is shot by a sniper.
• Mushroom Samba: As a result of eating brownies laced with LSD, the entire unit (except Chimney) are hallucinating and it's played for laughs until Bobby says he sees his daughter, who is telling him to join her in the sky.
• New Meat:
  • Buck is this for Season 1.
  • Eddie is this for Season 2.
  • Ravi is this for Season 4.
• The Narrator: Abby narrates the opening of season 1, explaining her life and her job, which leads into an emergency that introduces us to the main cast.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Athena and her boss reminisce about their previous boss, a sexist pig who Athena describes as "a real son of a bitch. May he rest in peace."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In “Let Go”, while responding to an unusual home invasion of rabid dogs, Athena and Hen rescue a sink-top cowering man from being mauled in his home by luring and trapping the dogs. After the rescued man escapes, the real homeowner shows up. Athena quickly realizes that the perpetrator called 9-1-1 to get himself out of the home robbery situation that he committed when he didn't account for said homeowner's attack dogs. She quickly redeems the situation later using the cell phone number of the perp.
  • In "Heartbreaker", it's Played for Drama as an attempt Athena makes to console a girl who's been dumped gives her the idea to mutilate her cheating boyfriend, whom she'd bound and gagged in her closet, to death and then putting him back together with superglue and giving him another heart in order to make him a better person'', not to mention kidnapping and preparing to kill the woman she was being cheated on with.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: While she agrees and understands Athena's feelings that led her to arrest her daughter's bully, her captain makes it clear she can't condone an officer using her badge for a personal vendetta and has to suspend Athena and put her on desk duty.
• No Honor Among Thieves: Two men come up with a fairly ingenious plan to steal thousands of dollars. However, one of them gets greedy and hatches his own plan to steal millions instead. He reports the first theft to the police so they are distracted looking for his partner while he tries to flee the country.
• Noodle Incident: How Chimney got his nickname isn't revealed. All we know is that the story isn't appropriate for kids. This is even lampshaded when he has to go down the chimney of a buried house to make a rescue when he says "If anyone asks, this is how I got my nickname."
• Number Two: Chimney is Bobby's second-in-command, taking over when Bobby is unable.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Athena's mother. While she makes her displeasure with Bobby being engaged to Athena, the main focus of her criticism is her daughter.
• Of Corpse He's Alive: A tactic used by the first responders sometimes so other victims don’t panic.
  • In “Let Go”, one of the riders of a roller coaster dies as he was flung out of the moving ride and hit the ground pretty hard. In order to keep the remaining riders of the stuck roller coaster calm, Bobby tells Hen and Chimney to pretend that he survived. They put him on a gurney and wheel the body to the ambulance.
• Off with His Head!: Losing time and patience in the “Pilot”, Buck decides to decapitate the large snake with an axe before it claims the strangled owner. Needless to say, most of his team treat the decision with ire, but oddly not the strangled woman.
• Once per Episode: Obviously: "9-1-1, what's your emergency?"
• One-Word Title: "Heartbreaker", "Trapped", "Stuck", "Dosed", "Haunted", "Broken", "Triggers", "Rage", "Monsters", "Malfunction", "Fallout", "Fools", "Pinned", "Powerless"
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Howard Han is called Chimney by everyone. It is still not revealed how he got this nickname.
  • Henrietta Wilson goes by Hen.
  • Evan Buckley is called Buck by everyone, even his sister. It’s a name he wants his friends and people that are close to him to call him.
    • His parents call him by his given name, showing that they don’t really know him.
  • Edmundo Diaz goes by Eddie, claiming the only people that call him by his last name are the people he won’t respond to.
• Open-Minded Parent: The inverse happens when Athena has to explain to her and Michael's kids that Michael is gay. Due to their religious background, she assumes the worst, but the kids are perfectly fine and accepting of this fact.
• Origins Episode: Although the series is an ensemble theme, every main character has had at least one episode devoted to how their life was before they came to be at Station 118.
  • Hen has - “Hen Begins”
  • Chimney has - “Chimney Begins”
  • Bobby has - “Bobby Begins Again”
  • Athena has - “Athena Begins”
  • Eddie has - “Eddie Begins”
  • Buck has - “Buck Begins”
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Eddie's ex-wife Shannon leaves him and their son. When she comes back, she does feel guilty and genuinely wants to be in her son's life, although she is hesitant about the idea of remarrying Eddie. She is killed in "Careful What You Wish For".
    • In turn, Eddie was in the army when his son was very young, leaving Shannon to raise him.
  • Hen's father left her and her mom when she was 9.
  • Chimney's father lives back in Seoul and is more focused on his much younger son with his Trophy Wife than Chimney.
    • Turns out to be more literal as of "Seize the Day", where during an assignment in America, his mom wanted to stay while his dad left to go back to Korea, and his mother died when he was 15, leading to him being taken in by his best friend's parents.
• Parental Hypocrisy: "Kids Today" has an elderly man who not only gets a flesh-eating STD, but ends up giving the entire population of his retirement home the STD in question. According to his daughter, his sex talk to her consisted of giving her a box of condoms and a can of mace. His son got mace but no condoms.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Kevin's parents acted as this for Chimney after his mom passed and his father never got him. They're the ones whom he introduced to Maddie.
  • Maddie was this to Buck when they were growing up.
• Perilous Marriage Proposal: A pilot fakes an engine failure as part of an elaborate proposal meant to invoke this trope. It works so well, she has an actual heart attack.
• Playing Sick: In “Let Go” Athena thinks that May is pretending to be sick, because she hasn’t studied for a test at school.
• Police Procedural: Sgt. Grant's side of the story usually deals with the run-of-the-mill tales found in the occupation, such as home invasions.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Hen and Chimney's first captain, Captain Vincent Gerrard, from "Hen Begins", while a firefighter, is also a sexist Jerkass. He introduces Hen to the unit as their "diversity hire", forces Hen to stay behind to prep dinner and clean up, and when Chimney helps Hen with dishes, he is told by said captain to "stop messing around in home ec. class". He also treats the Korean Chimney in a similar manner in "Chimney Begins", with him and the rest of the team shafting Chim with clean up duty and generally ignoring him.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The Westboro Baptist Church expies. Not only are they total homophobes (given their signs), their leader spouts racist sayings at Athena and refuses to let any non-white person touch him before the team is forced to carry him onto the ambulance. Eddie gets so fed up with the guy at one point that he says he could use the white half of his gene pool to treat him but he isn't sure which side that is.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: For some unexplained reason, Buck and Maddie don't always get the references that the others make.
  • In the “Pilot”, Buck doesn’t get Chimney’s reference to Conan the Barbarian, stating that he believes that the world began when he was born.
  • When Buck is tasked with driving the fire truck around to try and find a trapped little girl, in the “Pilot”, Athena tells him don’t go chasing waterfalls. Buck tells her he doesn’t know what that means, Athena assures him that no one thought he would.
• Powerful and Helpless: 911 operators suffer a variant - they can have the cops on the line and all the databases giving them all the answers they could need, but they still suffer 'dead-end calls' where there is well and truly nothing they can do but listen to people die.
• Precious Puppies: A small dog named Paisley has her owner killed during the earthquake. She helps Hen find the girl missing from her family and by the end of the episode, Hen has adopted her. Later on, in "Animal Instincts," Hoover at first takes on that role. Subverted later on when it's revealed that he has such bad separation anxiety that he tears up anything he can get his paws on as a result.
• Psycho Psychologist: The therapist Buck goes to in “Let Go” isn't crazy, per se, but she did sleep with Buck and then tosses him out without referring him to another, which is a massive violation of ethics and shoddy practice, respectively.
• Public Exposure: In "Buck, Actually", a woman is on a highway overpass desperate for her husband's attention. She flashes a crowd of people looking at her on the freeway, and later shoots the airbag and threatens (but doesn't actually shoot) Buck. While she and her husband make up, Athena arrests her when she is on the ground, her charges including assault, indecent exposure, and blocking traffic, among numerous other charges.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Carla is last seen in “A Whole New You”, which quite makes sense as the one she was caring for, Abby’s mother, dies. So she is no longer needed. She later returns when Buck recommends her to help Eddie and Christopher.
  • Abby leaves for Europe in "A Whole New You" shortly after her mother's death.
  • Lena Bosko rejoins Station 136 in "Malfunction".
  • Michael decides to accompany David to Haiti to perform humanitarian work at the end of "Defend in Place".
• Rank Up: Eddie is promoted from a probationary firefighter to a full time firefighter in "This Life We Choose."
• Reality Has No Subtitles: Eddie speaks Spanish with his family with no subtitles offered.
• Remember the New Guy?:
  • Buck’s sister Maddie is introduced in "Under Pressure", with no previous mentions of her at all in Season 1. However, this is justified by their three-year estrangement and Buck’s general lack of discussion about his past.
  • Bobby’s sponsor Wendell was introduced in the season 6 episode he died in. Bobby and Athena talk a lot about what an important person he had been in Bobby’s life since his relapse in season 1.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Invoked and used to his advantage by Murphy, who claims that every single call in the series is based on a real 9-1-1 call. There are enough of these to warrant its own page.
  • "Laser-Guided Karma" has the backstory of the dentist killed by a tiger, seeing as the guy who killed Cecil the lion was also a dentist and also was hit with a large amount of public outcry for the deed.
  • The season 3 Halloween episode "Monsters" used a variant of the 2002 death of Gregory Biggs, who got trapped halfway through the windshield of the car that struck him and was despicably left there to die by its driver.
    • In the show's variant, the driver isn't to blame, being too addled by a head injury to realize the victim is there, and the trapped man is saved when Buck realizes the body draped over the passing car is not just a Halloween prop.
  • "Suspicion" has similarities to The Dee Dee Blancharde case.
• Runaway Bride: In "Under Pressure", one of the stories is a groom who bolts from the altar.
• Running Gag: The 118 constantly getting their meals interrupted by a call. In fact, it'd be much easier to list down the times when they do get to finish a meal.
• Saying Too Much: Two women are in a "rage room" where people smash up items for therapy. One encourages her friend to cut loose on all her issues with her husband. They're getting into it as the wife yells about the dumb habits of his and her friend chimes in with one of his annoying antics after sex...which the wife had never told anyone, meaning her "friend" has been sleeping with her husband and attacks her.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • In "Help Is Not Coming" of the earthquake premiere, Bobby's team refuses to evacuate the very dangerous hotel site without Hen.
  • In “Hen Begins”, Hen regularly defied her racist captain to do the right thing.
  • In "Chimney Begins", when learning that the floor collapse caused a gas leak (hence all the victims complaining about migraines), Chim rushes in to save a fellow firefighter who was knocked out by the gas after said racist captain refused to listen to him.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Upon seeing the two angry guard dogs in “Let Go”, Chimney slowly backs away from the situation and allows Hen to deal with it. Claiming that if she thinks he’s a coward, she is 100% correct.
• Secret Other Family: "Wrapped in Red" has a woman taking her daughter to see Santa Claus, missing her airplane pilot husband. At which point, the girl sees her father...alongside a woman with their kids calling him "Daddy." It's after the guy runs off and is hit by a trolley that it sinks in to one woman that the other kids are older, meaning she's the second wife. They're still fighting at the hospital before realizing they're both better off without him.
• Seen It All: Ruth and Earl from the Gas & Sip, whose response to being robbed is simply "Again?".
• Sex Addiction: Buck 1.0 self-diagnoses as a sex addict.
• Sex with the Ex: By the end of "Haunted", Eddie manages to patch things up with his estranged wife, Shannon with this. Later discussed when both of them tend to fall to this instead of actually communicating.
• Shared Family Quirks:
  • Buck and Maddie have a habit of letting pop culture references fly over their heads.
  • Eddie and Christopher love to give snarky response when opportunity comes.
• Shower of Awkward: In "Under Pressure", Buck hears the shower at Abby's place and enters, thinking it's her, it's actually his sister.
• Shipper on Deck: Michael for Bobby and Athena.
• Shout-Out:
  • Maddie's trainer, Josh, tells her the first rule of dispatch is "Everybody Lies". Maddie doesn't get it.
  • In "Dosed", when Athena talks Bobby, who's having visions of his dead daughter, down the ledge, she says it's "Right here, right now" very much like in Strange Days, which was sampled by Fatboy Slim in the song of the same name.
  • In "Broken", Chimney is shown organizing his clothes with Hen using the Konmari method, even using the phrase "sparks joy".
• Side Bet: Once Bobby and Athena reveal they're together, Hen tells everyone else to pay up since she figured it out some time ago.
• Sixth Ranger: Lena Bosko is temporarily assigned to Station 118 after her team was injured during the tsunami. After the events of "Rage", she rejoins Station 136 after Buck is allowed to return to the 118.
• Smokescreen Crime: In "Ocean's 9-1-1", two thieves teamed fake a chemical attack at a bank to distract from them stealing money from an armored truck parked in front of the bank. Then it is revealed that one of the two thieves used the armored truck robbery as a distraction from the theft of diamonds from the bank's vault.
• Social Media Before Reason: Happens regularly, with people just standing around getting in the way of the first responders.
  • In “Let Go”, instead of clearing the area when the roller coaster gets stuck and allowing the first responders to do their job, bystanders stand around with their phones recording the situation. This doesn’t help, as Devon, the man hanging from the ride, doesn't want his situation to be put onto the internet and this just cements his decision to let go and fall to his death.
  • Downplayed with the beauty blogger in "This Life We Choose", who actually forgot her camera was still going when the team takes her to the hospital.
  • Played completely straight in "Under Pressure". Two YouTubers force their friend to put his head in a microwave full of cement so he can become a "legend". Of course, their friend becomes stuck.
  • Later on in the episode "Fools," the same two YouTubers make their friend ride on a playground carousel that's being sped up by a motorcycle wheel, resulting in his eyes popping out. Once the team stabilizes him, he lampshades this by saying "I need better friends."
• Spanner in the Works: Two examples of the robbers in "Oceans 9-1-1": One robber, a mechanic at the fire house, thinks he's got a great idea to rob a bank and excellently plays it out. What he doesn't count on is that his accomplice, the bank manager, decides to double-cross him by using the robbery (with a fake poison breakout) to steal some diamonds from the vault that he's "trapped" in while also suffering from the "poison." What he doesn't count on is Hen racing into the vault to try and save him so he has to alter the plan to take her out too which forces him into a foolish idea to swallow the diamonds to smuggle them out. It doesn't end well for him.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • In “Let Go”, while filling out her report about the dog attack, Athena asks Hen if the house’s slide door was open or closed. Hen says it was closed. With the front door also closed, Athena figures out that the only way the dogs would have gotten in the house was if they already lived there.
  • In one of his early days on the job, Bobby has to handle a restaurant that catches on fire. Something about it bugs Bobby and he returns to the scene where he's met by Athena. She states she was bugged by how the sprinklers in the building failed to go off and discovered the water main was shut off. Bobby responds that the electrical box didn't show any signs of the patterns that would be there if it was the source of the fire. He also notes how the father had raced into the blaze to find his son and headed right to the very heart of the fire..which he'd only known if he's the one who set it in the first place.
• The Squadette: Hen is the only female member of the 118.
• Stairs Are Faster: In the “Pilot”, once the team has rescued the baby from the pipes, they need to get her down to the ambulance as fast as possible, however the elevator is taking too long, Buck tells Bobby to give the baby to him and he’ll run down the stairs with her, that he’s twice as fast. He’s right.
• Stalker without a Crush: Season 3 has an arc involving Maddie and a fitness trainer who calls 9-1-1 multiple times. Maddie traces the call and in an attempt to help her, ends up stalking her. When her supervisor finds out about this, while sympathetic to Maddie's experience with abuse, she suspends her from taking calls and orders that Maddie must undergo a psychological evaluation before returning to work.
• Stealing the Credit: A non evil version. In season 1, Chimney is dating a woman that is adrenaline junkie and foreplay for them is him telling her stories of all the high risk rescues he performs, however he is just telling her about the rescues others have performed and saying he did them.
• Struggling Single Father: Eddie. Due to his wife abandoning him and their son, he struggles to find childcare, often leaving said son with relatives while working.
• Take a Third Option: In “What’s Next?” a beam is pinning two injured passengers of the train crash one a young female victim and the other being Abby’s fiancé. Bobby, Eddie and Buck have to decide on who they are going to save first, as the pressure of the beam will likely kill the other person. The longer they wait the higher the chance of both of the passengers dying. The younger victim has the higher rate of survival, but Buck, after it's revealed that he promised Abby that he would save her fiancé, comes up with a dangerous plan that should save both passengers.
• Take My Hand!:
  • In “Let Go”, Buck attempts to rescue a man stuck on a roller coaster by reaching out his hand. He doesn’t succeed.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Bobby attempts this in the “Pilot,” but is unsuccessful.
• Team Dad: Bobby to the 118.
• Teens Are Monsters: Athena's daughter, May, attempts suicide as a result of bullying. Athena then tracks down the bullies at a house party. She then tells the girl who was the main bully about what happened and what does the girl do? Say that she's glad that May almost died and then starts insulting her. Subverted with one of the other girls who actually feels terrible about the bullying and even asks Athena to tell May that she's sorry.
• Teen Pregnancy: Seen on the first call in the pilot episode.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: After their fight at the hospital in “Pilot”, Buck and Athena have to work together to save a little girl who is stuck in her house, while men are breaking in to rob the place.
• Tempting Fate:
  • A common occurrence as someone will make a line that will soon lead to a disaster.
  • Too often, the rescue crews are just remarking on how easy a job looks when something happens to create a bigger emergency.
  • The fourth season premiere (airing in January of 2021) has a worker on a phone telling his wife "It's September, how much worse can it get?" Not only does the dam he's on break but (as viewers know) things would, in fact, get much worse for the Los Angeles area over the last months of 2020....
  • In "Jinx", the firehouse never uses the word "quiet" in any context because they believe it will jinx them and they have to deal with crazy calls for the entire shift.
• Threatening Shark: Subverted in New Beginnings. The crew initially respond to a call of a man being attacked by a shark, and find a shark beached in the middle of the street with a man trapped with his arm down its throat. When they start to approach things with a focus on saving him, he begs Bobby to save the shark. It's a wildlife rehab team that was transporting their patient for release, and the man was bitten while inserting a hose into the shark's mouth to save her. After very carefully prying open the shark's mouth to free the man, the shark becomes their patient and is transported to the ocean via their firetruck.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted, to varying degrees.
  • Athena and Michael are seeing a therapist together to deal with his coming out and how it affects their family. Later they and Harry go to family therapy after Harry's kidnapping by serial rapist and killer Jeffery Hudson.
  • Buck attempts to see a therapist about losing his first patient on the job in “Let Go”, but instead of helping Buck, he and the therapist end up sleeping together. She then kicks him out without referring him to anyone else. He starts seeing a therapist again in Season 4, and it is assumed that he still is.
  • Eddie takes Christopher to a therapist after he starts having nightmares, which also prompts Lena to tell Eddie about being taken to therapy as a child after her father died.
  • Several of the characters are required by their supervisors to seek therapy at various points –  Eddie after accidentally almost killing someone in an illegal fight club, Maddie after killing Doug in self-defense and again after stalking a woman who was in an abusive relationship to try and get her to leave her husband, and Hen after accidentally killing a teenage girl with the ambulance due to a software malfunction. These have varying levels of success and rarely last longer than a few episodes.
  • As of season 5, Eddie has started seeing a therapist again.
• Time Skip:
  • Each season starts a few months after the end of the previous one, as they roughly follow airing schedules.
• Title Drop: “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
  • From Season 2 onwards most episodes have a title drop, usually some dialogue spoken.
• Too Dumb to Live: About half of the calls the gang get are people who do incredibly stupid things.
  • Athena's daughter almost kills herself because she was being viciously bullied at school. An angry Athena busts the bully at a house party she was throwing and tells her what happened. Does the bully show any remorse for what she did? Nope. Instead, she says that she's glad it happened and starts throwing insults about the girl. That's right. This girl flat out says that she's glad a girl she bullied almost died to the girl's mother, who also happens to be a cop! And then she's shocked when Athena arrests her. Downplayed since Athena's actions were very illegal and she ultimately ended up in more trouble than the bully.
  • A guy tosses a couple of pine cones at a tiger at an open-enclosure zoo so they can get photos...and the tiger manages to get out of the area and start chasing him down.
  • In “Under Pressure”,, two guys force their friend to put his head in a microwave full of cement for YouTube views. Later, when the guy is cut out of the cement, his friends record the event for more views. And they're upset when Bobby, sick of their stupidity, drop kicks the phone in the pool.
  • In "Awful People", the leader of the Westboro-expies is so racist he actively refuses medical care from the multiracial team until they have force him into the ambulance.
  • In "Stuck", a girl got her head stuck in the tailpipe of a car because a cute guy dared her to. She also thinks she can get a date with one of the men of the team, and Bobby calls a cab for her and her friends.
  • A bank manager thinks the best way to smuggle out $6 million in diamonds during a robbery is to swallow them all. It never occurs to him that there's a very good reason why swallowing that many stones isn't done more often as it can be lethal and causes him to collapse and die of severe stomach failure later that night.
  • A race car driver, whose long hair is his trademark, doesn't tie his hair back so it ends up getting caught in the gears and ripping part of his scalp off.
• Tracking Device: How Bobby finds Buck in the “Pilot”, when he takes the fire truck out again to have sex, the truck has a GPS tracking device.
• Trail of Blood: In the “Pilot”, Athena follows a trail of blood to the toilet pipe a baby was born in.
• Trapped In a Tanning Bed: An Asshole Victim who ran a gym died when he used his own tanning bed (which he kept insisting wasn't broken and refused to fix) and couldn't open it when he was done. It was Death by Irony because the day before, he left his dog in the car with the windows rolled up.
• Tritagonist: While the show presents itself as an Ensemble Cast of first responders in Los Angeles, the leading representatives of the police, fire department, and 911 operators usually fall onto Sgt. Athena Grant, Cpt. Bobby Nash, and Abby Clark (Season 1) respectively. Nash's paramedic team, usually, play off him or the aforementioned sergeant and operator.
• Twist Ending:
  • The end of "New Beginnings," where Chim is stabbed by Doug, who turns out to be Maddie's abusive (soon-to-be ex) husband.
  • "Ocean's 9-1-1" is a very lighthearted episode right up until Bobby is suspended because of a discovery made during the robbery investigation.
  • "Suspicion". In the last few minutes of the episode, the team has successfully rescued a child from his abusive mother and everything seems to have been neatly wrapped up when Eddie suddenly is shot by a sniper.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Buck and Maddie's father always sides with his wife at their children's expense, no matter how self-centered she gets over their middle child's death. The first flashback in Buck Begins shows that he is somewhat more willing to give Buck some affection, but his behavior visibly worsens with each Time Skip as he follows Margaret's lead.
• Valentine's Day Episodes:
  • “Heartbreaker”
• Vast Bureaucracy: Eddie has to deal with this in order to obtain proper care for his special needs son.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: All the 9-1-1 operators are this.
  • Abby's role in Season 1
  • Maddie's from Season 2 onwards.
  • May joins in Season 4
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: The Valentine's Day Episode opens up with a guy flying his girlfriend in a plane and faking engine problems so that she'll open up the manual and read the marriage proposal he wrote in it. Things then go wrong as the girlfriend collapses due to all the stress affecting her broken heart syndrome. After the boyfriend is able to land the plane and the team is able to revive the girlfriend, she still says yes to the proposal, much to Buck's shock. Although she does give the guy a good slap in the face after he puts the ring on.
  Abby: Love hurts.
  • Played for Drama in "Stuck", where a guy tries to propose to his girlfriend by coming up an escalator with a ring pop, only for him to fall through the floor of the escalator when it collapses. Then after the team is able to pull him out, and the girlfriend says yes, the poor guy then dies due to internal bleeding.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Wendell, Bobby's sponsor, is said to be an important figure in Bobby and Athena's family. He dies in the episode he first appears, Season 6's midseason finale.
• Wham Episode:
  • The mid-season finale of Season 2 has a "Good News Bad News" like scenario. Good news? Bobby and Athena are now engaged. Bad news? Maddie's ex husband has finally found her.
  • The episode "New Beginnings". Not only does Doug stab Chimney multiple times, he kidnaps Maddie, who ends up having to kill him in self-defense.
  • "Ocean's 9-1-1" has the fact that Bobby may lose his job as captain, and is put on suspension.
  • Two episodes later, "Careful What You Wish For", not only ends with a news report of a serial bomb threat throughout L.A., but Eddie's wife Shannon is killed in a car accident.
  • At the end of "Christmas Spirit," Michael tells Bobby that he just found out that he has a brain tumor.
• Wham Shot:
  • In "Merry Ex-mas", we finally see what Maddie's ex husband looks like in a flashback... and he's the same guy Chimney met earlier in the episode.
  • The end of "Powerless" as the caller on a derailed train is revealed to be Abby.
• What Happened to the Mouse??: There's little or no follow-up on the victims after the team has gotten them to the hospital. As Bobby states in the “Pilot” their job stops at the hospital doors.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • In the “Pilot”, Buck initially refuses to have to wait for the teen mother of the baby that was stuck in the pipes, Bobby overrides his decision and puts the mother in the ambulance. Buck then tells Athena that if the baby dies it’s on her. Once they make it to the hospital, Athena catches up to Buck and chews him out, telling him that he does not get to decide who lives and dies, based on his own bias. If he doesn’t change his thinking he’ll get someone killed.
• What You Are in the Dark: In "Awful People", Hen's ex Eva returns to steal custody of their son. When Hen later leaves to confront Eva, she finds Eva dying from a heroin overdose. Hen seems tempted to just leave her there to die, but she saves her anyway. Hen gets the last laugh, though, by telling Eva's parole officer so she goes straight back to jail.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Many of the "Begins" episodes, which focus on a single character and their backstory/how they came to the LAFD, are set entirely or almost entirely in the past (namely the episodes focused on Eddie, Chim, and Bobby). Others (focusing on Athena, Buck, and Eddie) are told using flashbacks alongside scenes set in the present day.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: The “Pilot” has Bobby's crew arriving, to their surprise, at a motel den decorated with illegally hoarded snakes to respond to the hoarder's suffocating pleading for help. Chimney makes it very clear that he doesn't want the situation to persist any longer, mainly out of trepidation of surrounding reptiles. Not that it stops him from playfully taking the credit for the rescue in order to appease his girlfriend.
  • "Monsters" reveals that Chimney is a bit creeped out by crows as well.
• Yandere: Melora of “Heartbreaker”. After finding out her boyfriend cheated on her, Melora killed him, mutilated and put him back together with superglue, and wants to put Athena's heart in him, believing it will make him a better person. When Athena gets a look in Melora's medicine cabinet, she finds plenty of medication that's long expired.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious:
  • In "The Taking of Dispatch 9-1-1" Maddie tips off Chimney to the hostage situation by saying, "I love you, Howie."
  • Eddie calls Buck "Evan" in the scene where he tells him that he made Buck Christopher's legal guardian in the event of Eddie's death. This is the only time Buck is referred to as Evan by someone other than his parents or Maddie that isn't a show of displeasure^note Chimney in 2x01 calls Buck this when his attempt to badmouth Eddie ends up dragging Chimney down in the process.