It takes only the opening minutes of “9-1-1”—their everyday tone, their mere flash of a look at lives touched by unhappy reality (unhappy but not unusual)—to suggest rich drama afoot. Here’s a woman in her early 40s still upset, a year later, over being ditched by her boyfriend—a woman torn by sorrow for her mother, an Alzheimer’s victim, and by worry for the people whose emergency calls she fields at a 911 call center in Los Angeles. In short, an introduction oozing with potential for the sodden and the shopworn—which, despite its subject, “9-1-1” is decidedly not.

Source: Wall Street Journal December 28, 2017 22:18 UTC