TL;DR: 9-1-1: Nashville kicks off with twang, tornadoes, and too much trauma. Fun in flashes, but unless it drops the soap opera tendencies, this spin-off might not make it past its first chorus.

There’s something about television spin-offs that feels like playing with fate. Sometimes it works, sometimes it burns you alive while the theme song plays triumphantly in the background. When I sat down for 9-1-1: Nashville, the latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s ever-expanding emergency-response multiverse, I was weirdly hopeful. Not excited, exactly—hopeful, like when you get a text from your ex saying, “Let’s talk,” and for some reason, your lizard brain decides this time might be different. Spoiler alert: it’s not.

From its opening frame—a glossy helicopter shot of downtown Nashville shimmering in that honeyed Southern light—I could tell this show was going to lean hard into the setting. Within five minutes, we’ve got cowboy hats, rodeo ropes, and a literal tornado on the horizon. If subtlety is a color, 9-1-1: Nashville doesn’t own the paint. And yet, beneath all the twang and trauma, I found myself caught between mild admiration for the ambition and deep frustration at how familiar all of this felt. It’s Lone Star with a new accent, and just as guilty of repeating the franchise’s most maddening mistake.

Let’s start with the Harts. Chris O’Donnell, who’s somehow both perpetually handsome and perpetually stressed, plays Captain Don Hart, the firehouse patriarch. He’s got a firefighter son, Ryan (Michael Provost), a horse-breeding wife, Blythe (Jessica Capshaw), and more generational drama than a Taylor Swift album. Then, because the writers apparently decided that wasn’t enough emotional kindling, we meet Blue (Hunter McVey), Don’s secret son who works as a stripper and accidentally shows up to a fire scene in uniform. No, really. He’s not a firefighter; he just dresses like one. Imagine Magic Mike showing up to your emergency and actually saving a life—that’s the energy we’re working with here.

Now, I get it. These shows thrive on melodrama. But 9-1-1 in its prime had a balance: the chaos of the job interlaced with human connection. Every 118 call in Los Angeles wasn’t just about spectacle—it was about how people respond when the universe tries to kill them with a rogue Ferris wheel or a sinkhole. Here, though, Nashville doesn’t seem to know what kind of show it wants to be. It’s one part procedural, one part country soap, one part Fire Country, and somewhere between the smoke and the twang, the heart gets lost.

If you watched Lone Star, you’ll recognize the red flags. Everything revolves around one family. The captain and his kids, the ex-lovers, the hidden sons—they’re all tangled up in a web so tight it suffocates the rest of the cast. The beauty of 9-1-1 (the original) is its ensemble. The found family. The mismatched weirdos who build trust through trauma. By the end of the Nashville pilot, I could tell you the backstory of every Hart, but ask me about the rest of Firehouse 113, and I’ve got nothing. Roxie (Juani Feliz) exists. Taylor (Hailey Kilgore) sings. Cammie (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) answers the phone. That’s it. The characters who should be the emotional backbone are treated like background extras in someone else’s family reunion.

And that’s where 9-1-1: Nashville makes its biggest misstep. It confuses being dramatic with being deep. The tornado, the secrets, the cowboy imagery—it’s all surface-level spectacle. The show wants to be Yellowstone but doesn’t realize that Yellowstone works because beneath the machismo is a genuine critique of legacy and land. Here, legacy is just shorthand for “family problems that lead to yelling over barbecue.”

Watching the pilot, I found myself weirdly nostalgic for what 9-1-1 used to be. Remember that first season? It was wild, yes, but it had a rhythm. You could tell the writers actually liked their characters. You rooted for Buck and Athena because you knew them, not because you were told to. Nashville tries to fast-track that emotional investment, giving us family revelations before we even know the stakes. It’s like meeting someone at a party and, within five minutes, they’re sobbing about their divorce. You want to care, but you just met this person. Let me like you first.

That being said, it’s not all disaster (well, it is, but some of it’s entertaining disaster). The production design is slick, the action sequences have bite, and O’Donnell brings gravitas even when the script gives him nonsense. There’s potential buried under the hay bales—you can feel it in the quieter moments, like when Ryan and Blue lock eyes across the firehouse, both realizing they’re competing for the same father’s attention. If the writers could just zoom out and let these people breathe—let them be firefighters, not just melodrama magnets—the show might have a shot.

But that would require trusting the audience, and Nashville doesn’t seem to. Every beat is overexplained, every emotion underscored by country guitar twangs so loud you half-expect a Ford truck ad to start mid-scene. It’s the TV equivalent of someone elbowing you in the ribs while saying, “Get it? He’s a firefighter, but he’s also putting out emotional fires!”

The tragedy of 9-1-1: Nashville isn’t that it’s bad—it’s that it could have been good. There’s room for a Southern spin on first responder storytelling. Nashville, as a city, is rich with contradictions—faith and fame, history and heat, community and chaos. But instead of exploring that, the show treats the setting like a postcard. Rodeos, twang, and tornadoes. Yeehaw, cue the montage.

When the episode ended, I found myself thinking about the flagship 9-1-1 episode that aired the same night. The LA team literally went to space. That should’ve been ridiculous, and yet it worked, because we’re invested in those people. That’s the difference. You can throw a tornado, a spaceship, or even a sentient AI ambulance at me—if I care about the characters, I’ll go with you. But here? I’m not sure I care enough yet to follow Firehouse 113 through another storm.

Maybe future episodes will course-correct. Maybe the Hart family drama will fade into the background, and the writers will remember that the heart of 9-1-1 was never just in the emergencies—it was in the found family that responded to them. But for now, 9-1-1: Nashville feels like a song that knows all the right chords and still manages to play off-key.

Final Verdict: 

9-1-1: Nashville wants to sing, but it’s too busy screaming. The premiere is loud, melodramatic, and frustratingly familiar, recycling the same family-centric mistakes that tanked Lone Star. There’s undeniable potential in the cast and concept, but until the show finds its rhythm and remembers why audiences fell in love with this franchise in the first place, it’s more static than symphony.