9-1-1: Lone Star team breaks down Mateo-Marvin sitcom, teases Tarlos wedding and 'trauma' to come
When Julian Works first heard they were doing a sitcom on Tuesday's episode of 9-1-1: Lone Star, he wasn't sure about stepping into multicam mode. "I didn't know what to think of it when I read it," the actor tells EW. "I didn't get it."
But once Works — who played both his Lone Star character, firefighter Mateo, and 9-1-1 character, criminal Marvin — was on set, he saw the method to the madness of the script.
"It was definitely one of those things where we had to work through on set," he explains. "But that was the whole fun part about it. You don't want anything to be so easy. And it ended up being super fun."
The sitcom sequence, which came after Mateo hits his head in drunken stupor following the death of Marvin, also featured Mateo's 126 family: Owen (Rob Lowe) as his uncle, Tommy (Gina Torres) as his aunt, Marjan (Natcha Karam) as his cousin, Judd (Jim Parrack) as the milkman, as well as T.K. (Ronen Rubenstein) and Carlos (Rafael Silva) as an Andy Griffith-style cop duo.
Lone Star co-creator and showrunner Tim Minear says the writing team had a blast putting their actors in a completely new situation, and figuring out how to tailor the sitcom characters to their 9-1-1 counterparts, like making sure Marjan still covered her hair.
Kevin Estrada/FOX Julian Works as Mateo on '9-1-1: Lone Star'
"We knew Marjan was not going to be wearing a hijab in the sitcom, so we found another reason to cover her head and put her in the curlers with the giant scarf," Minear says. "And then, I loved seeing T.K. as this sort of Barney Fife and Carlos as the strait-laced cop. Gina Torres doing a hat tip of sorts to Diahann Carroll from Julia. Rob Lowe doing a sitcom dad couldn't be funnier. And Judd as a milkman? I didn't know I needed it."
"Everyone had their chance to give their own little fun side," adds Works, who is also a huge fan of the theme song that introduced his dream sitcom, Double Trouble. "Tim was nice enough to share it with me and I still have it on my phone. I still play it every once in a while."
But Mateo wasn't the only 126 member dealing with family drama this episode. Judd learned that his son Wyatt (Jackson Pace) is going to welcome a baby with his girlfriend and wants to quit school to become a firefighter like his dad.
Minear says the storyline was inspired in part by a call he received about recruitment being down at the real-life Austin Fire Department. "So I wanted to do a story about somebody trying to enter the fire service, and it made sense that it be Wyatt," he explains, noting that he'd also been looking for a way to bring Pace ("a fantastic actor") back onto the show. "I wasn't that interested in cutting to Wyatt going to school or seeing Wyatt trying to break into the tech world, and the idea that he'd want to follow in his dad's footsteps because he made the same, you could say, 'mistake' at a young age and getting a woman pregnant before they were married, I just like the idea of playing Judd having to relitigate his own youth through this son that he just barely met just a year or two ago."
The co-creator promises plenty of more Wyatt-Judd scenes as season 4 continues ("Every moment that they spend together, it's gold for me"), as well as a dating storyline for Marjan, who will learn that her ex-fiancé has moved on and just welcomed a baby with his new wife.
"At 27 years old, Marjan has never really dated like most young people in her cohort," Minear says. "She had been in this arranged situation since she had been 12, and she likes to live by the traditions, right? There's no hard and fast rule that she can't date without a chaperone, but she's never done it before. And so the entire 126 will band together and take turns being chaperones for Marjan so she can meet somebody."
And then there's T.K. and Carlos' impending wedding. "I think we're all kind of waiting for that," Works says, speaking for both cast and fans. But first, "there's definitely going to be some trauma," the actor teases. "I won't stay with who, but there's definitely some sad, deep moments. Tim's always finding a way to throw something at you last minute that you're totally not expecting — that's going to just pull you right into the TV."
Could that trauma and the Tarlos wedding be related? All Minear will say for now is that "T.K. and Carlos are trying to figure out exactly who they want to officiate the ceremony, so they're going to meet a series of officiants. And out of those meetings, a new complication is going to arise that neither one of them had really seen coming.
"I know that a lot of my Tarlos fans would like nothing more than just smooth sailing to the end," he adds with a laugh. "But that's just not how I roll."
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