9-1-1 Lone Star - A Show More Woke Than Watchable

I don't watch a lot of TV being busy doing other things. When I do, I want to be entertained with quality story lines.

9-1-1 Lone Star threw out the storytelling part and replaced it with a focus on wokeness, making a rather unwatchable mess.

The TV show 9-1-1, from which 9-1-1 Lone Star sprang, does have a fair bit of PC to it, considering it's set in LA that's to be expected. Of course, it had its Black Lives Matter moment and other stuff, but it typically wasn't in your face and did not replace the story of the show itself and was generally more subtle and in the background rather than in your face.

9-1-1 Lone Star flips the script on that, being woke as all heck, and real short on story-line.

The story begins: A disaster at a Austin, Texas storage facility wipes out all but one member of a firehouse in a rather earth-shattering kaboom. A promising start that swiftly goes downhill.

The Austin Fire Department then heads to New York to hire Rob Lowe, their only hope (who has early stage lung cancer from 9/11 of course), to diversify the department (because Austin, Texas is just a backwater in fly-over country and obviously only has white good ol' boy firefighters, amirite?) and rebuild the empty station.

Lowe, in between being very concerned about his hair and moisturizing (no, not making that up), goes forth and totally ignoring any existing civil service and firefighting hiring protocols assembles a crack woke team of:

- A devout Muslim female daredevil acrobatic firefighter from Miami;

- A trans from female-to-male firefighter from another city (Chicago?), who happens to be a magically talented crack investigator;

- A Hispanic who has continually failed the written test for the fire department but, because he is detail oriented at cleaning the Fire Chief's car, Lowe feels he'll be a great firefighter so no need to actually pass the academy;

- Lowe's fictional son, who is not just very, very gay, but also has an opioid addiction problem and is just recovering from trying to commit suicide after his prior lover broke up with him; and

-The Texan lone survivor who is present as a PTSD suffering, stubborn, somewhat conservative good ol' boy, and not depicted as overly smart. But, thankfully, he does at least have a redeeming feature by having an African-American wife who is depicted as very wise, sensible, and able to order him around.

Yep, you can just imagine the hiring board, the Austin firefighter's union, and not to mention the City's liability insurance company absolutely losing their stuffing over such a hiring process.

On top of that, you have Liv Tyler, who is horribly miscast as a top paramedic. Liv, when not working, is busy searching for her sister's killer, and is busy handing out medications and performing off-book medical procedures for illegals. The illegals in thanks for her medical services then give her a clue to the disappearance of her sister three years before. Yes, really.

Of course, the average white Texan represented on the show are depicted as overly conservative in a stupid backwards way, or being benightedly Christian-religious (which is bad, unlike a devout Muslim praying on a prayer rug in the station, which is good), or racist. They often score a perfect trifecta of all three in the show.

In short, the show decided to put maximum wokeness way ahead of the story line and replace an actual plot with actual disasters/emergencies at the forefront with PC pablum and it really shows. I got through the first episode just to see if they could actually stop this from turning into a PC-train wreck, and then threw in the towel mid-way through the second episode.

Basically, the show is designed to gut the standard heroic Emergency!/Rescue show and bend it to the progressive zeitgeist and let the cognoscenti tea-bag on their imagined stereotypical denizens of a red state. Meanwhile, the show producers are apparently too ignorant to realize that Austin is a rather solidly blue dot in Texas.

In short, there's much better stuff on TV to watch today and 9-1-1 Lone Star is not worth your time.