Cop-and-firefighter drama 9-1-1 debuts on ABC March 14. Produced by 20th Television in association with Ryan Murphy Television and Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision, it has Angela Bassett, Peter Krause and Jennifer Love Hewitt in the cast.
9-1-1 had six seasons on Fox. Cast and producers spoke of the move at the TCA Winter Press Tour in Pasadena last month. Tim Minear, co-creator and showrunner, said the new network has given 9-1-1 new energy. “It feels like the first year of the show in a lot of ways,” he said. “The enthusiasm at the network is through the roof … They’re just really engaged, and they already love the show. I just think it’s a shot in the arm for all of us.”
9-1-1 reaches 100 episodes this season. Season seven offers the usual array of extravagant disasters, including a tsunami and a fighter jet that goes missing in the skies.
Minear said 9-1-1 is more than a disaster show. “It can be a rom-com, it can be a soap, it can be satire, it can be a heartbreaking melodrama,” he said. “It can be all of those things in the same episode.”
Also premiering March 14 is limited series Apples Never Fall on Peacock. Based on a Liane Moriarty novel, the drama features the Delaney couple, played by Annette Bening and Sam Neill, who sell their tennis academy in Florida and plot their retirement. They get a knock on the door from a stranger — a woman who apparently just escaped from a violent partner. The young woman essentially moves in with the Delaneys, arousing the suspicions of their adult children.
The suspicions multiply when Joy, played by Bening, disappears.
There are seven episodes.
Bening’s many, many films include American Beauty, Postcards From the Edge and The Kids Are All Right. She was intrigued to try a TV series. “I thought, wow, this is just such an opportunity,” she said at the TCA Press Tour. “It was really fun for me because I had never done something over so many episodes.”
There’s lots and lots of tennis in the series, and some of the court scenes get pretty hot. Showrunner/exec producer Melanie Marnich said all the tennis gives Apples Never Fall its edge. “What’s so powerful about it is when you’re a family of deeply competitive people raised by deeply competitive people, it’s in the blood, it’s in the DNA and, to me, that amps up all the mystery,” she said. “It amps up what could have been possible, what these people could do to each other in the name of competition, in the name of competing for love.”
