Let’s talk about the hot firefighter show.
If you don’t spend much of your day on tumblr, it’s possible that network drama 9-1-1 has passed you by. It’s a procedural about first responders in Los Angeles, inexplicably headed by A-List actors Angela Bassett and Peter Krause (get that bag, I guess).
9-1-1 is about as ridiculous as we’ve come to expect a network procedural to be, increasing the disaster level every season, while never killing off any of the main characters, making it one of those low-stakes, empty-calorie shows that you can watch any episode of.
But of course none of that is why it’s a hit on Tumblr. That’s all to do with #buddie — the non-canon ship of Eddie Diaz and Evan “Buck” Buckley.
Eddie, a single dad parenting a son with cerebral palsy. Buck, his brother-in-arms at the firehouse. Buck helps Eddie get extra care for his son Christopher. A stranger mistakes Christopher for Buck and Eddie’s son, and Buck doesn’t correct her. In one episode, the pair wind up on an influencer’s livestream and the comments are about how they make a cute couple (nudge, wink). After Eddie is shot, he tells Buck that he’s made him Christopher’s legal guardian in his will. More than enough fodder for the pair to be tumblr’s 7th most popular ship in 2024.
Every season (and we’re now deep in season 8), buddie fans have been convinced that the ship is about to be canon. Fandom olds will be very familiar with this dance: shippers sure they’re reading the signs correctly, others convinced the show is queerbaiting, still others annoyed that every fictional male friendship needs to be interpreted romantically, still others annoyed that the default interpretation is “straight until proven otherwise”. Veterans of Teen Wolf’s sterek, or Supernatural’s infamous destiel, or (crosses self) Sherlock’s johnlock, know how this unfolds.
But unlike previous incarnations of this debate, 9-1-1 is a Ryan Murphy show, with existing queer characters, and a lead mlm relationship in franchise spinoff 9-1-1: Lone Star. If the writers and showrunners wanted these characters to be in a relationship, there wouldn’t seem to be much stopping them.
And, in fact, in season 8 Buck realises he is bisexual, and starts dating firefighter Tommy Kinnard (Lou Ferrigno Jr).
Of course #biBuck just kicked off another round in the discourse. There was alternately rejoicing throughout the land and rending of garments. Some fans celebrated a developing queer storyline on network tv not immediately resulting in painful death. Others were outraged that the white firefighter got the main character storyline. Buddie shippers believed this was the first step to both Buck and Eddie realising they actually want to be with each other. Antis thought this was how the network escapes the queerbaiting allegations without making buddie canon.
Lou Ferrigno Jr. helped not at all by making Cameos (short video clips solicited and paid for by fans) chatting about his time on the show:
Will they end up together? I don’t know. But Tommy’s a good guy. Tommy’s really got a lot to offer. And you need to shake things up a little bit, because Tommy extended the life of Buddie, because now Tommy and Buck are going on a date and what happens if that doesn’t work out? Huh? Have you thought of that?
Have you?
Anyway — all of this keeps circling back for me to the irrational fixation on needing ships to be canon, on searching for that validation from “official” sources, on poring over the signs and signals, on wanting to be proven “right”. These are all the portents of your fandom tipping over into conspiracy thinking, something I explore at length in Everything Breaks at Scale.
Aja Romano wrote a great post on tumblr many years ago, and revisited it more recently to add:
fandom conspiracies that evolved out of intense shipping, precisely because those priorities of validating their ship, just as i discussed in 2012, skewed the way shippers perceived objective reality and became a narrative they clung to with a zealous mentality, sometimes against all rationality
Aja was referencing their great article over at Vox, “If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom”, as relevant today as it was a year ago. 9-1-1 is back in March, and Maddie’s kidnapped (not for the first time) by a serial killer. So, there’s that to look forward to. As always, if you know someone who’d get a kick out of this newsletter, please forward it to them.
‘My Morning with Sleep No More Superfans’ - a gorgeous piece about the close of one of my favourite shows, the icon of the immersive era (paywall - but Hell Gate are amazing and you should chuck them some $ if you have it, we love independent journalism these days).
This interview with Rachael Lense, the NASA communications lead who made a pride flag out of NASA imagery that became the most-shared image on Bluesky (sadly removed from the NASA website as a result of a purge by the current administration).
Teen Vogue relaunches their Ctrl C feature, tapping different content creators so they can try out their favorite celebrities’ looks. From plus-size to mid-size, non-binary folk and modest dressers, the column looks at different ways fashion can be recreated for marginalised bodies.
