Entertainment

Mathieu Young/FOX

'911' Season 2 Began With A Two-Part Premiere

by Megan Walsh

The Season 2 premiere of Fox's 9-1-1 stretched across two nights, with one episode debuting on Sept. 23 and the other following a day later. It's a pretty epic two-parter, but how long is the 9-1-1 premiere? If you're signing up for two nights' worth of TV, you might want to know exactly how much time to set aside for viewing.

Warning: spoiler alert for Season 2 Episode 1, "Under Pressure."

Though 9-1-1 regularly airs Mondays on Fox, "Under Pressure" aired a little earlier than usual after a Sunday NFL doubleheader. Then it resumes with Episode 2, "7.1," at its typical time. Each episode is around the normal length for an hour-long TV drama (which means that sans commercials it clocks in at 40 to 45 minutes) but if you decide to watch one right after the other, then you've got almost two hours of TV ahead of you.

However, if you've already caught the first episode back, then you might be eager to see how it continues. There were a lot of changes when the show returned for Season 2, from casting shakeups to plot shockers, and 43 minutes may have felt like barely enough time to cover them all. Thankfully, the wait for Episode 2 is fairly minimal. Hopefully it will pick up right where the previous episode left off.

Showrunner Tim Minear spoke with TheWrap ahead of "Under Pressure" and explained that he viewed the first two episodes of Season 2 as a "feature-length film." The first part has all the intensity, while the second deals with the fallout. The tone of each installment might be different, but they still tell a cohesive story. As Minear said:

The big earthquake hits at the end of the first night on Sunday, after football, and then we have really what is Part 1 of a giant, almost like '70s disaster movie, on Monday night — which then continues on the third night [next week]. There is a second part of the earthquake episode that's very different from the first part, that's maybe more intimate and more emotional, so we’re really covering a lot of frontier with the first few episodes.

Episode 1 caught up with most of the characters from Season 1, but not everyone was back for the new season. Though Angela Bassett, Peter Krause, Oliver Stark, Aisha Hinds, and Kenneth Choi returned, Connie Britton is no longer a part of the cast. There are also two new characters who viewers were introduced to this year: Ryan Guzman's Eddie Diaz and Jennifer Love Hewitt's Maddie Buckley, who also happens to be Buck's estranged sister.

Technically, each episode of 9-1-1 is the same length as any hour-long drama; though "Under Pressure" and "7.1" should be considered a two-parter, they're still distinct and separate episodes that aired on different days. But despite all that, they're still connected enough that it may feel like one is continuing the story the other started with hardly a pause. It's a 2-for-1 deal: twice as much 9-1-1 but without having to wait a week in between.