There was a moment near the end of 9-1-1’s three-part season-eight premiere, as a police officer played by Angela Bassett was trying to land a mangled passenger plane on a freeway with a child as her co-pilot while a swarm of bees terrorized Southern California, when I stopped and wondered aloud if anyone out there is doing it better. I think my exact words, mumbled to the furniture in my living room, were, “Oh, hell yeah, Angela Bassett.” One week later, she was trying to wrangle a fully grown tiger that had cornered a terrified landlord inside a studio apartment. At some point in there, she took a break to shop for houses with her firefighter husband. This last thing may not seem as intense as the first two, but you try buying a home in Los Angeles on two government-employee salaries; reasonable arguments can be made that you’d be better off moving into that studio apartment with the tiger. The woman has a lot on her plate.
Her character does have a name, for the record. It’s Athena Grant. You can tell this is true because other characters on the show are always saying things like, “Bobby … Athena’s on that plane … and she’s flying it.” Which, like, of course she is. She’s Angela Bassett. That’s the whole point. On another show, in another context, with another actor, maybe this doesn’t work as well. Maybe you want a performance in which the actor vanishes into the role. That’s not what we’re doing here, though. I mean, who else would you want flying an airplane that has a hole in the ceiling that the original pilot flew out of after it collided with a second, smaller plane that had been diverted off course by the aforementioned tornado of bees? Let me go ahead and answer that one for you: No one. Give me Angela Bassett in that situation ten times out of ten. Tom Cruise could never inspire this much confidence.
She’s been doing this for a while, too. This is the eighth season of 9-1-1, spread across two networks. The show premiered on Fox and ran for six seasons before it was canceled and then picked up by ABC. Those first six seasons were plenty wild with earthquakes and tsunamis and bounce houses flying away during children’s parties and attempted museum robberies and people getting disfigured by escalators and … look, I did say “plenty wild.” But things are on another level since the move to ABC. Last season, the seventh, opened with a three-part event, during which Athena and her new husband — Bobby, played by Peter Krause, also giving us everything we could ask for — have their honeymoon cruise interrupted by pirates and a hurricane. This season, we had the bees and airplanes. Did I mention that she was on the plane because she was transporting a cooperating witness in a sex-trafficking operation and that the witness was also the man who murdered her previous fiancé? Feels like I should mention that.
This could all be very silly. It is sometimes, usually on purpose, especially when these assorted calamities are dropped between melodramatic running story lines that would be a bit much on a daytime soap opera. (Try binge-watching the series and doing a shot every time someone almost loses their children. You’ll be calling 911 yourself by season four.) But that’s what makes the stuff Angela Bassett is doing here so special. She is playing this all dead straight, doing all of her dramatic action scenes as though she’s in an Oscar-caliber war movie. There is no winking at the camera, no tongue in cheek — none of it. That’s what makes the whole thing work. That’s how the show doesn’t slip free of its foundation and float away like that bounce house I mentioned earlier. Angela Bassett is giving you the full goddamned Angela Bassett on network television every Thursday night.
She doesn’t have to do this, either. Bassett is correctly regarded as an icon. Go look at her IMDb page sometime. It’s just banger after banger with everything from biopics to cult classics to award-winning performances in Marvel movies. She has multiple Emmy nominations for her work in the FX quadrant of the Ryan Murphy Universe, killing it in genrework for American Horror Story. She could easily look at this chaotic network procedural as a paycheck and mail in her performance. She could give it 80 percent — a solid B-minus effort — and not a single person anywhere would be upset about it. This is a show that once did an entire episode about a famous author faking his own death as part of a staged treasure hunt to promote his next book, but then, whoops, he actually died; it would still be, like, fine if she gave it that 80 percent. Lesser actors sleepwalk through prestige-y dramas on streaming services all the time.
There are a few lessons here. There’s one about taking pride in your work no matter what that work is, about giving it your all even when you don’t have to. There’s also one about letting talented people do their thing and staying out of their way while they’re doing it. (I sincerely hope every person involved in 9-1-1 is having the time of their life putting this insane little show together every week.) But mostly, I think the lesson here is that you can always trust Angela Bassett to land the plane, whether the plane in question is a metaphor for a three-episode network-television event or a literal flaming airplane full of terrified passengers that has lost the ability to turn and has to skid across a Los Angeles freeway because some bees got loose a few episodes earlier.
Honestly, I would trust her to land this plane in real life at this point. Maybe more than the actual pilot. I think you would, too.
