The 9-1-1: Lone Star team didn’t officially know the show was ending with its upcoming fifth and final season (premiering Monday, September 23 on Fox) until recently, but the writing was on the wall before then.
“We didn’t officially find out this was the final season until about three weeks ago or something like that, when it was on an ad for the show,” co-showrunner and executive producer Rashad Raisani tells TV Insider. “But we knew even before the writers’ and actors’ strikes because of some of the deal-making minutia, because this was a Disney-owned show on a Fox network that it was gonna be difficult for it to go past Season 5 just from a financial numbers point of view.”
As a result, the approach to writing the season was to “hopefully give it a poetic ending and make people feel like it was incredibly satisfying,” he continues. That being said, expect it to end “very on brand.”
Raisani teases, “It’s gonna have an apocalyptic ending in more ways than one. I’m immensely proud. I haven’t cut the last two episodes, so I haven’t seen how they fully work out, but I’m very confident that they will give you this feeling, I hope, that we are leaving all of these people right where they should be at the end of their journeys—for better, for worse. I think people are gonna have a tremendous sense of both closure and longing to not want to leave them behind, that we’re leaving them just before we’re ready to say goodbye, which I hope is the mark of a show that’s ending at the right time. It’s when you feel like it’s too soon, but yet you feel like, OK, that’s a beautiful last chapter for them if that has to be the last chapter.”
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He also stresses that, when it came to writing the end of the season before they knew officially it would be it, he wanted to leave the door open for more. “We didn’t want to close the book entirely,” he says.
Does that mean that 9-1-1: Lone Star could be saved or there could be a spinoff?
“Who knows?” Raisani says. “From a purely numerical point of view, I’d say it’s tough. It’s really tough. But then I look across the landscape, at shows like S.W.A.T. and SEAL Team who have been in sort of similar circumstances to us in some ways in that they had a studio that was different than their network. They were more mature shows that had a lot of years into them, which means they’re very expensive, and they found ways to survive. So it has been done. So there’s still some hope some way.”
He’s also “more than happy to jump into it” if anyone was interested in a spinoff. “I do feel frankly like we’re leaving these people too early,” he explains. “I still think there’s so many stories left to tell with these actors and these characters in our world. So I’m a realist in that I think it’s gonna be very challenging for us to keep going with our current environment. But I’m also an idealist in that if there was any hope I would jump to the door.”
How do you want 9-1-1: Lone Star to end? Let us know in the comments section below.
9-1-1: Lone Star, Fifth and Final Season Premiere, Monday, September 23, 8/7c, Fox
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