“Tim Minear and I are working on a new spinoff that we’re actually writing, and that we hope to get on the air next fall,” Murphy tells Variety. “Sadly, we all love ‘Lone Star,’ but the financials just didn’t work. It’s a Disney company that was on a Fox network, and it just was never going to work. And we had a long run of it. So now we’re going to launch a new show in a new city that I can’t name, but it’s fun. And ‘9-1-1′ moved to ABC and suddenly became, I think, the biggest show on Thursday night. They obviously have an appetite for that, so we’re going to give them another one that I really love.”
The concept and location of the new “9-1-1” spinoff is still to be determined.
“9-1-1,” created by Murphy, Minear and Brad Falchuk, premiered on Fox in 2018. After Season 6, the series moved to ABC since the series is produced by 20th Television, part of Disney. “9-1-1 Lone Star,” for its part, premiered in 2020 on Fox, where it has remained. The fifth season kicked off on Sept. 23, shortly after Fox announced it would be the last, with 3 million viewers.
Adding in streaming, it became Fox’s largest scripted telecast in Live +3 since the last “Lone Star” finale in 2023, excluding post-NFL telecasts. Meanwhile, “9-1-1,” along with Murphy’s “Doctor Odyssey,” have been in the top two spots on the Hulu Top 15 for the last three days.
Rob Lowe, who leads “9-1-1: Lone Star,” told Variety in August that he had expected “Lone Star” to end, and that just made everyone work harder.
“We all went into it pretty much knowing that it was going to be the last season, so that affected everything we did,” he shared. “We wanted to really show everybody what is still possible in network television if people have the appetite to do it. It feels like it’s probably the end of an era of a certain type – well, it doesn’t feel like it. It is the end of an era of a certain type of show we once had an opportunity to make, and I think they’re great. We wanted to go out making our case for the value of shows like that, and I think we did a really good job. The stories that we were able to tell on a weekly basis in terms of the scope and scale – that’s probably the thing I’m the most proud of. They were truly like mini-movies every week.”
