Lou Ferrigno Jr. As Tommy Kinard | 9-1-1 → 2x09

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Lou Ferrigno Jr. – Lover of Animals, Art & Animal Art 🎨, Soulful Scorpio

Few characters in television have had as much impact as Tommy Kinard. And that's even though he didn't exactly show his best side in season

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THE 118 ♡ PAST + PRESENT

Upon her return to shore, Athena's son finds himself in trouble with the law. Meanwhile, Buck grows envious as Eddie forms a close bond with someone else, and the 118 rescue a woman who's stuck on receiving a rose at an iconic mansion.

remember this. this was insane

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about some of the choices the writers made in season 7 re: Buck, Tommy, and Eddie, and about the conversations people in fandom are having about them. This is really long and tedious as hell, and I'm sorry for that, but I kind of needed to spill all my thoughts somewhere to organize them in my own brain.

Huge disclaimer: I am not Tim Minear's secret BFF, so I'm talking out my ass with the spec about writers' motivations and thought processes. Season 8 could air and prove me wrong on every single point.

As someone who started watching 911 in season 3, I latched on to the potential of Buck/Eddie as a ship right away. I was never somebody who necessarily expected or believed that it would become canon, but I loved the characters, and I loved the pairing. I was content to enjoy it as a well-fed fanon ship, but I’ll admit I did have moments where I thought they could have gone there: the shooting, Eddie’s breakdown, the lightning strike/couch theory era, etc. The season 6 finale poured cold water on the small hope of it ever going canon for me, and I think season 7 has put the nail in that coffin (which is fucking wild for me to say, considering one half of the pairing is now canonically bisexual).  

Here’s the thing: I had a moment before 7x04 when the press was clearly hinting at a bisexual Buck arc and we suspected a Buck/Tommy kiss was going to happen where I thought, Oh, man, they could do it! They could have Buck come out and discover he has feelings for Eddie. My assumption was that if they did, Eddie would return or at least acknowledge his feelings for Buck an episode or two later, because the idea of two totally separate coming-out arcs has never made sense to me in the context of the business of television.  

Although the fandom itself leans young and queer, 911’s general audience is heterosexual, middle-aged, and unfortunately has limits about how much queerness it believes is ‘realistic’ in a procedural genre television show (see: all the backlash on social media after 7x04 about how 911 is “woke” because they “turned Buck gay” despite the show always featuring queer characters; see also: all the het women whining on Facebook and Instagram about how Buck is now unattractive because he’s “gay” and thus unavailable to them, despite him being bi and not a real person, lol.) Like it or not, the show’s survival depends on this middle-of-the-road audience of casual viewers, not a few thousand passionate fans on the internet, and the network is always going to prioritize keeping its biggest demographic happy. 

I think it’s clear that the writers had a hell of a time fighting for queer Buck, and we now know that they were flat-out unable to manage it on Fox. ABC was willing to take the risk, although I do find it very interesting that they greenlit two more queer male characters, Buck and Tommy (one main, one guest/recurring) after the show had already lost two queer male characters, Michael and David (one main, one guest/recurring.) It was a lateral move. Just food for thought. 

In any case, getting two queer mains -- both Buck and Eddie -- would be much harder to pitch to a money-focused executive suit. Given Oliver Stark’s comments on a queer Buck storyline being considered in season 4, the (dubious) Twitter leaker’s supposed knowledge of queer Eddie being pitched in season 5, and Lou Ferrigno Jr.’s comment about Tommy being floated as a love interest for both Eddie and Buck at various points in the planning process, I think that paints a pretty solid picture of what might have happened: Fox shut down the possibility of making either Buck or Eddie queer, and ABC okayed it for one of them, not both. And the writers sat down, thought about both characters’ storylines and queer-coding, and decided that Buck made the most sense for the story they wanted to tell with Tommy. 

Let’s consider the other option, though -- that ABC was convinced in season 7 to greenlight Buck and Eddie coming out, with the understanding that it would lead to a relationship. The fandom would be thrilled, of course. But how would you, as writers and producers, sell this to the very important general audience? 

If the show was really going to go there with their two most popular “hot guy” male leads and they wanted to get the general audience’s buy-in that they would badly need, they would probably want to frame the arc from the beginning as a story about two friends who discover that they love each other. (As a queer person, I don’t love the tired old trope of “I thought I was straight but maybe this person is my exception and/or I don’t know what my sexuality is but I love you,” but I could definitely see them thinking that would be more palatable to an audience that had never considered Buck and Eddie to be anything more than platonic friends. In fact, they actually did kind of use this method with Buck/Tommy, in that Buck’s arc is focused on one person and he hasn’t yet explicitly called himself ‘bisexual’, but I’m somewhat optimistic that they’ll remedy this in season 8.)  All that’s to say, if they wanted to make Buddie work for an audience that wasn’t already primed to scour the material for subtext, they would need to make Buck and Eddie’s realizations explicitly about each other. They would need the audience to accept the idea of them being romantically linked to each other early on even if they didn’t immediately have the two of them get together. 

The show didn’t do that. They linked Buck’s bisexual arc to another character. And not just a new, throwaway character that could be easily discarded  – a character who already fit into the 911 universe, a fellow firefighter who would be easy to integrate into future storylines, and a character with a distinct and established personality (love him or hate him, you can’t deny people feel strongly about his character).  

So now Buck has come out, and he’s in a relationship with Tommy. This arc was thankfully received well – or at least wasn’t controversial enough to have an effect on the ratings, which is what ABC cares about – and for the general audience and new viewers, this facet of Buck’s journey is associated with Tommy. In real life, of course, it’s reductive (if not offensive) to say that somebody’s sexuality is about one person; if he were a real person, Buck would be bi whether or not he met Tommy and whether or not he ever dated a man. But because Buck is fictional, and this storyline was written specifically in the context of Buck discovering his feelings for a particular person, that person is now linked to Buck’s bisexuality in the minds of the general audience.  

That choice alone gave me pause. If you wanted to convince a skeptical audience that Buck and Eddie were meant for each other, why would you introduce such a solid rival? Still, a love triangle could work. After 7x05, there was speculation in the fandom about setting up a jealousy arc, in which Eddie would realize his feelings after seeing Buck and Tommy together. Theoretically, this could be a way to ease the audience into the idea of Buddie, if you did it early enough in the story. But there are two big things the writers did in the ensuing episodes that pivoted the characters in the opposite direction:  

The writers doubled down on Eddie being in-your-face heterosexual in a way that he wasn’t in his oddly chaste relationship with Ana. They used valuable screentime on postcoital scenes demonstrating that he’s happily down to pound town onscreen with Marisol; it's the nun thing that throws him off, not her being a woman. He very much seemed to enjoy having sex with her before that and is sexually frustrated when his religious guilt prevents him from continuing to have sex with her. More significantly, the arc with Kim at least implied, if not outright confirmed, that Eddie is still in love with Shannon – his feelings are strong enough to blow up his entire life for the chance to recapture even a pale imitation of what he believed they had together. The writers made an effort in season 6 to reframe Shannon as the great love of Eddie’s life, where it was sort of messier and less rose-tinted in previous seasons. The fact that they doubled-down on this in season 7 makes it extremely unlikely that the general audience would believe that Eddie could go from pining for his wife years after her death to secretly in love with Buck the whole time. Not only did seeing Buck with Tommy not trigger any latent feelings for his friend in Eddie, but he spent the entire second half of the season stewing in his unresolved feelings for Shannon instead.  

The writers portrayed Buck as being fully “in” with his budding relationship with Tommy. He is explicitly attracted both sexually and romantically to Tommy. He doesn’t express any doubts or reservations about his choice after 7x05 and in fact is the one to pursue it as something serious. They didn’t have Buck choose time with Eddie over Tommy, even when the blow-up with Chris would have provided them with a perfect narrative reason to do so. They didn’t have Tommy express any jealousy about Eddie or even seem slightly concerned about his friendship with Buck, even though there were opportunities to do so. The writing went out of its way to frame Buck’s friendship and his relationship as two separate parts of his life that aren’t in conflict with each other. Eddie has been openly and enthusiastically supportive of Buck's new relationship. Eddie likes Tommy. Christopher likes Tommy. Tommy likes both Eddie and Christopher. Buck loves them all. There’s no drama there, and if this was supposed to lead into a love triangle ending in Buddie, I really believe they would have made that clear to the audience with blatant foreshadowing.  

All that’s to say, this show isn’t subtle. If they were intending to convince the general audience to buy into the idea of Buddie, they would be working hard to muddy the waters surrounding the Buck/Tommy/Eddie of it all from the beginning; they would want the audience to have doubts about Tommy as soon as the relationship began and establish Eddie's jealousy right away. Why on earth would they take the trouble of getting their viewers (many of them new to the show after the network switch) attached to Tommy as a character and get them invested in Buck and Tommy as a couple in a happy little romcom if they were going to turn around and jettison it all and say Surprise! It was Buck/Eddie the whole time!? From a writing perspective, that’s a bad twist. If you want that reversal to work, you need to build it up beforehand and plant seeds of conflict from the start. And for that casual, general audience, there are no seeds; they aren’t scrutinizing every word and glance for proof that Buck and Eddie have feelings for each other. They’re not pulling from past episodes to draw parallels in the narrative. The vast majority of them probably don’t even have an inkling that Buck/Eddie is a thing that people ship. They’re not reading Tommy’s every action in bad faith and looking for hints that he’s actually terrible for Buck. They sit down to watch an episode, take it at face value, and then don't think about the show again until the next episode. For them, a Buddie twist would be unsatisfying if not outright unbelievable, because it would come out of absolutely nowhere. 

911’s writers have been known to make baffling and offensive choices, but they are capable of creating a careful story, and I don’t think they would fumble this so badly when so much is at stake for the future of their creative choices. ABC took a risk with bi Buck, and if the writers and Tim have any sense at all, they wouldn’t want to invite backlash from the audience or from their bosses.

If they were going to go forward with queer Eddie and a love triangle in season 8, they could and should have set it up in season 7, given that they actually had their renewal in the bag early enough to plan ahead for once. To me, season 7 read as Eddie being finally and definitively cast into the role of platonic best friend, while Tommy was cast into the role of romantic partner. If Tim and Co. truly wanted to make Buddie canon this whole time and finally got permission to go ahead, I don’t believe they would have made any of the choices they made in season 7. 

Buck getting kissed by Tommy vs Buck kissing Tommy

louferrignojr: Beyond a pleasure and a privilege it has been working with the illustrious #PeterKrause both fictionally AND nonfictionally... A consummate professional, with boundless talent, sweet as pie with the kindest of eyes. Captain Bobby Nash will be forever missed but never forgotten! #Petekrause #manmythlegend #RIPBobbyNash #SweetPete #i❤️pete #SeriouslyWhoDoesnt❤️Pete?!

Fandom Metrics Recap 10/28

re: bucktommy

overall topic: bucktommy #10, 911 #7

top 10 celebs: Oliver #7, Lou #9

911 #3 show

#1 ship- BUCKTOMMY

Lou returning to swat with all the children he got in the 911 divorce: