Is 9-1-1 actually about to go there with Buck (Oliver Stark) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman)?! For the first time onscreen, the show does address the possibility.
Buck may have moved into Eddie’s house when his best friend left for Texas to be closer to his son, but he’s been sleeping at his sister Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and her husband Chimney’s (Kenneth Choi). He also tries to make new friends, with Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) back at the 118, his first attempt. But as Ravi points out, he had plenty of time before now. Buck argues it took him a minute to warm up to Eddie when he first got there, you know, “almost a whole shift.” Ravi’s been there four years. And when they go out for a drink and Buck just keeps talking about Eddie, Ravi gladly brings Buck’s ex-boyfriend Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) over and makes his escape. Buck brings Tommy home with him, and the next morning, gets a major shock when Tommy says he’s no longer scared he’ll break his heart since “the competition’s out of the way.” (He’s mostly kidding.) Buck argues that Eddie’s straight, and Tommy laughs that off. “I don’t know if that means he’s questioning anything about Eddie, but I think what he’s saying is that’s kind of not my point, whether he’s straight or not,” executive producer Tim Minear says of that.
Buck argues, “I don’t have to want to sleep with everyone I have feelings for and I don’t have to have feelings for everyone I sleep with,” and that’s where they leave it. Buck then talks to Maddie about what Tommy said. “What’s that even supposed to mean, I’m living in Eddie’s old house, therefore I must be in love with him?” She asks him point blank if he is, and he says he’s not, “as much as everyone seems to want me to be hopelessly pining for my straight best friend.” He does say that not having him in his life or at work leaves a big hole. “I was a little shocked by how head-on Tim wanted to confront it, but I don’t really have too many opinions on it outside of I trust where his writing goes, so if Tim thinks it’s best to confront it head-on, then I think it’s best to do the same thing,” Stark tells TV Insider. “I’ve learned over the years to pretty much have blind faith in where he wants to take it. I was a little shocked at first, but I was I was excited to get to play those scenes out. Obviously I always love Buck and Maddie scenes. So I was really excited to get into them.”
But this does seem to be playing out almost like the classic setup for Character A to insist he’s not in love with Character B, only to later realize he is. So what exactly is going on here? “I just felt like it was something that had to be said, and it made sense for Tommy to say it. Whether Tommy’s right or not is almost not the point,” Minear says. “It makes sense for his boyfriend to notice, you moved into the guy’s house and really he takes up a lot of space in your world and I think you might be in love with him, and Buck protests and kind of knocks that down. And also when Maddie asks him flat out, he says, it’s not like that. So you can either believe Buck or you don’t have to. It’s up to you.”
Was Buck telling the truth about his feelings in that moment? Stark thinks so. “He’s telling his truth in the moment, for sure. I don’t think he’s trying to lie and hide anything from [Maddie],” he says. “He’s never even considered this before. He’s telling his truth, for sure in that moment. This is something that’s been brought to him from Tommy and something that he was not, as I say, having any kind of prior thoughts about.”
As for the “everyone” that Buck mentioned wanting him to be pining to Maddie, Stark thinks that had more to do with the impact of what Tommy said than there being others who have brought it up. “It was such a profound, prominent moment after Buck has finally, as he says, been able to sleep in this place,” he explains. “ So I think that’s a testament to how important the moment of Tommy saying it was rather than a quantity of times that it’s been said to him.”
While there are more stories coming up with Buck and Eddie, when it comes to anything about potential feelings, “not right away certainly,” says Minear. And according to Stark, upcoming episodes have “more action, emergency-focused storylines, so there’s not really too much time that we spend in the coming episodes to focus on, the personal ins and outs. We don’t really delve into it. I don’t know if, as we move further down in sort of the season, that’s something that Tim will want to kind of dive into or not. But I can say that that currently we haven’t really dipped our toes back into that.”
Aisha Hinds directed this episode (her first), and among the things that excited her about the script was this storyline. “There’s been a lot of talk — people are always invested in Buck and his love life. So I knew that it would be a great opportunity to kind of unpack some things and kind of really address some things and say out loud some things that maybe people have been saying or thinking and really speak to it very directly.” It was also about “that dance that you do with yourself in your heart where it’s like in one moment you may have a broken heart and you’re kind of projecting, is this really about the fact that do I really want to be back with Tommy or am I trying to fill a void in my heart because my best friend just left and moved away? And so it’s me as a director, I’m not trying to answer the questions for these characters. I think they know best what the conversation is in their hearts and in their minds, but I’m sort of creating a place and a safe space for them to feel all the colors of their emotions and feel the full breadth of their thoughts,” she continues.
“But with that, there are words on the page. And so we got a chance to directly ask and answer questions that I think our audiences have been wanting asked and answered. Maddie served as kind of the mouthpiece for a lot of our audience, like, ‘Hey, are you in love with Eddie?’ And Buck pointedly answers the question, and so we’ll just see if that will satisfy our audience or not,” according to Hinds. “But ultimately I think that me and my job is to just honor the truth of what he speaks in this moment and allow it to be that.” She also raves about how supportive Stark was of her directing. “Sometimes he came on days that he wasn’t even working just to be a support to me, and I really appreciate that,” she says.
“She’s embarrassing me,” Stark says when we tell him that. “I take a lot of photos behind the scenes on set, and obviously it was such a big deal for Aisha, but sometimes on particularly busy days, I find it hard to do that, but I really wanted to capture her doing her thing, so I thought the ideal time was on days that I’m not working — I could be there as her personal photographer — so I came in on those off days and offered to make her tea or coffee or whatever. She’s such a great friend of mine, and I wanted to feel totally supported in a personal and professional sense throughout the making of her episode. So I wanted her to feel confident that if she has a note, she could always bring it to me, and then I also wanted her to feel confident in a more personal friendly way that if she wanted to just talk about the experience, she could also come to me.”
He found it “easy” to be directed by Hinds. “I have supreme trust in her as a friend and as an actress so if she has an instinct about a scene, I’m always going to want to try it and give over to it. She leaned into her strength, which is obviously her ability as an actress, so she was great to talk to day to day about the scenes and the emotional journey of the characters, and then it was really fun to watch her learn more and more about the technical aspect as we went and see her become more and more proficient in that,” he says. “So yeah, it was a really lovely and easy experience because she’s great at everything she does. “
As for why Buck has yet to unpack, it’s because “as soon as I do that, it means Eddie and Chris aren’t coming back for real,” he explains. And that means, as Maddie tells him, he has to learn how to be alone again. It’s what he’s starting to do at the end of the episode, when he does finally unpack. Going forward from that, “Buck has to embrace his Buckness,” says Minear. Adds Stark, “Buck is kind of a loser. I say that in a loving way. I think Buck is somebody who in social settings often found things easy as he was growing up. So the fact that he’s now not so great at it is maybe new for him.”
