***POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR 9-1-1 SEASON 8, INCLUDING EPISODE 14***
I have a confession: up until a month ago, I’d never seen a single episode of 9-1-1. It’s not like I hadn’t had the time — the popular procedural drama, which tells the story of LA-based first responders like firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and dispatchers, premiered back in 2018 and is currently airing its eighth season on ABC.
To give myself credit, I only found out the show existed sometime in the past year, and I never really had a reason to watch it. I’ve always been apprehensive to jump into long-running series — there’s so much lore to catch up on! — and I don’t usually have the patience to follow more than a select few week-by-week shows per year. Plus, with a family of health care professionals, I’ve just never been one to gravitate towards medical dramas for entertainment.
As a result, prior to March of this year, my understanding of 9-1-1 was pretty limited. Basically all I’d ever heard about the show were the following three details: 1) it starred Angela Bassett, 2) her character (Sergeant Athena Grant) had landed a plane at some point, and 3) there was some sort of storyline involving a swarm of bees. And yes, I know these few out-of-context facts already make the show sound pretty crazy, but I’ve since discovered that embracing the “crazy” — or rather, just being deeply silly and proud of it — is a big part of the charm of 9-1-1.
Was it this charming absurdity, then, that finally prompted me to answer the call and check out this show?
No, actually — I only officially started watching 9-1-1 this year because of a relationship. Technically speaking, it was the mere potential of a romantic relationship, or “ship” as it’s known in online fandom spaces, that got me hooked on the show. (Don't worry, though — my appreciation of 9-1-1’s many quirks came soon after, once I’d consumed a handful of episodes.)
To put it another way, I started caring about 9-1-1 purely because of an insatiable curiosity to understand what in the world was happening between “those two gay firefighters” everyone seemed to be talking about. I simply needed to know what was going on — a classic case of “fear of missing out,” if you will.
The ship in question, of course, is the fan-favorite pairing of Evan “Buck” Buckley (Oliver Stark) and Edmundo “Eddie” Diaz (Ryan Guzman). Best friends, work partners, and essentially co-parents (it’s a whole thing, trust me), Buck and Eddie’s relationship status (dubbed “Buddie”) has been the subject of rampant fan speculation for the better part of seven years, which coincides with the Season 2 arrival of Guzman’s Eddie. The characters have never officially dated on the show or even kissed, but that hasn’t stopped millions of viewers from hoping that finally, maybe one day, they actually will.
The online Buddie-centric discourse reached a fever pitch last year, which I suspect is right around when I first learned about the show’s existence. Avid viewers of 9-1-1 will no doubt recall the pivotal Season 7 episode from April 2024 that saw Stark’s beloved character share a kiss with firefighter/helicopter pilot Tommy Kinard (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) in the fourth episode — and, notably, the show’s 100th episode overall — thus confirming Buck’s long-suspected bisexuality.
In the world of historically closed-minded network programming, this development for Buck was massive. It truly felt like everyone was talking about it, which certainly caught my attention. I knew nothing about the show at the time, but I was nevertheless still pleased to learn that a network procedural had achieved such a milestone for one of its lead characters.
However, as is often the case thanks to the never-ending influx of new content on TV, because I wasn’t actively watching this particular show, just a few days after the initial bi-Buck chatter died down last spring, all mentions of Buck, his bisexuality, or just 9-1-1 in general promptly fell off my screen.
Discussions of 9-1-1 did manage to worm their way back into my algorithm for a brief period last fall with the three-part premiere of Season 8 — which I now know was the source of the aforementioned “bee-nado” and subsequent emergency plane landing plotlines — but then they once again disappeared.
Frankly, this meant that I forgot all about this show until the first week of March, which not-so-coincidentally coincided with its return after a nearly four-month winter hiatus. Unbeknownst to me, the mid-season finale had left Buck reeling from the discovery that his best friend was planning to move back to Texas to be with his son, Christopher (Gavin McHugh). Now that the season was picking back up again, it appeared that Buddie fans were hoping that bombshell would trigger big changes in Buck and Eddie’s relationship.
All this speculation piqued my interest — as a romance connoisseur, I try to pay particular attention to any potential romantic developments in media — but since I still knew next to nothing about the show at this point, I mistakenly assumed that Eddie was the one Buck had kissed during his coming-out arc last season, and this moving-to-Texas plot was just the latest obstacle in their developing relationship.
Imagine my confusion then, when upon doing some cursory research, I discovered that no, Buck hadn’t gotten together with the fellow firefighter that everyone and their mom seemed to be shipping him with. He’d kissed some other firefighter, a character I didn’t even know existed, but he also continued to share a deeply co-dependent bond with his best friend.
Looking back on it, I think this was the precise moment I fell off the deep end for this show. It seemed that every new detail I learned about Buck and Eddie’s dynamic was so delightfully intriguing, and there was already an entire seven seasons’ worth of material to dig into, let alone the soon-to-premiere second half of Season 8. Given my usual avoidance of long-form TV, I’m used to relying on passing glances between characters and rare but cherished one-on-one interactions to sustain my investment in a potential romantic pairing.
With Buck and Eddie, however, for the first time ever I found myself excited about the prospect of having hours upon hours of backstory to catch up on, rather than intimidated.
Just before 9-1-1 made its return on March 6th, I remember texting a friend about my newfound Buddie obsession: “I fear I’ve picked up another potential ship to track via its weekly episode releases on social media.” At the time, I had no intention of actually watching the show for real — I didn’t even know where to watch it, for one — but I did plan to follow the progression of all things Buck-and-Eddie over the next several weeks as new episodes dropped.
A mere three days later, however, I sent that same friend the following update: “Okay so. Terrible news. I’ve discovered that that gay firefighter show is easily accessible.” I followed it up with an ominous “This is not good for me.”
My friend rightfully wondered if maybe it was actually really good for me, to which I responded, “Debatable. Remains to be seen.” Armed with easy access to the show, the very first episode I sat down to watch in full was the Season 4 finale (Episode 14), a classic amongst Buddie shippers for how much it legitimizes Buck and Eddie’s connection. At the end of the previous episode, Eddie gets shot in broad daylight by a sniper that’s targeting firefighters (I know. I know. Just go with it, okay?), so this finale opens with an absolutely hysterical Buck desperately trying to save Eddie's life.
As is the case with all the main characters on this show, Eddie miraculously survives that near-death experience and gets discharged from the hospital within the same episode — but not before threatening the sanity of Buddie fans everywhere with a few key words that he delivers to Buck.
In an iconic conversation that comes towards the end of the episode — dubbed “the will scene” by fans — Eddie bluntly informs Buck that the latter is in Eddie’s will as Christopher’s legal guardian, should something ever happen to Eddie. And the kicker? The will has been this way ever since Eddie’s other near-death experience the year prior (a well collapses on him in Season 3 Episode 15).
Eddie is only bringing it up now because he didn’t like how little Buck thought of himself and he wanted his friend to know just how important he is to both Eddie and Christopher. “You act like you’re expendable — but you’re wrong,” Eddie tells him, and it’s one of the most profoundly romantic lines in the show without even trying to be.
As you can imagine, this was a pretty big episode to experience as my very first introduction to 9-1-1 — which is exactly why I selected it. What better way to dive headfirst into all things Buddie than to watch what might just be their most important arc to date?
After starting off hot with the sniper storyline, I made sure to educate myself on what fandom research told me were the other most monumental Buddie episodes. The list included the following must-sees: Season 2 Episode 1 (Eddie’s introduction and the Buddie “meet-cute”), Season 7 Episodes 4 and 5 (Buck’s coming out arc), Season 8 Episode 6 (Buck and Tommy’s break-up, along with what many consider to be the start of Eddie’s gay awakening), and Season 6 Episode 11 (Buck’s coma dream after being struck by lightning).
I had a lot of fun familiarizing myself with Buddie lore, but a funny thing happened as I did all that homework — I discovered that I wanted to keep watching the show, even if an episode didn’t feature any particularly groundbreaking developments for Buck and Eddie. In between a steady diet of Buddie-centric episodes, Buddie fanfiction, and fan-made Buddie video edits, I also fell completely and totally in love with 9-1-1 in its own right. Instead of just passively observing one specific storyline from the sidelines, I accidentally became a full-on 9-1-1 devotee.
Case in point: in the month or so since I joined the fandom, I’ve already made it two-thirds of the way through the so far 120 episodes (although I’m not watching them in any sort of coherent order). I’m deeply invested in all the characters now, not just Buck and Eddie. I regularly cry, or laugh, or do both, while watching an episode. I ramble non-stop about the show and keep all my closest friends updated on its developments.
And most of all, I just find it so deeply comforting — which is maybe a strange thing to say about an emergency first responder show, but I stand by it. In less than a month, 9-1-1 has genuinely become one of my favorite shows, full stop.
So yeah, even if “those two gay firefighters” never become a real couple on the show, even if Eddie never even becomes a gay firefighter like we’ve all been expecting him to, even if both Buck and Eddie find separate endgame relationships and Buddie is dead in the water, I’ll forever be grateful that this ship introduced me to a show that means so much to me.
But seriously — please let Buck and Eddie kiss already!
New episodes of the eighth season of 9-1-1 are released Thursdays on ABC at 8 p.m. ET and are available to stream the next day on Hulu/Disney+.