‘9-1-1’: Viewers Swoon as Buck and Abby Meet in Person

It took five episodes, but 9-1-1 finally gave viewers what they wanted.

9-1-1 operator Abby (Connie Britton) and Buck (Oliver Stark) finally met up face-to-face during Wednesday’s all new episode, albeit under stressful circumstances.

Buck stopped by Abby’s apartment to lend a hand after her mother, who has dementia, walks out of her apartment in the middle of the night.

Britton teased the face-to-face encounter a few minutes before the episode on Twitter.

“Sometimes in the darkest times there is a light,” she wrote.

Ahead of the episode, Oliver Stark talked to TV Line about acting with Britton for the first time.

“It was exciting and daunting,” Stark (aka Buck) told TV Line of shooting his first in-person scenes with Abby. “I was actually a little nervous for it. Like, it’s Connie Britton. What if I’m rubbish and she’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ Fortunately, the first-date pressure is taken out a little bit because they’re essentially on a job. They have something else to focus on, but you still get these little undertones of ‘Oh, hi, we’re actually here.’”

TV Line reports that since 9-1-1 doesn’t always do traditional table reads before each episode, as Stark shares he’d never acted in the same room as Britton, though they try to call each other on the prop phones for their scenes whenever possible.

“It’s always interesting for me when I actually see the episode,” he says. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what she was doing when she said that line,’ or ‘Oh, that’s the face she was making.’”

After several episodes of Buck and Abby engaging in flirtatious calls in between emergency calls, fans of the hit Fox drama were excited to see the characters interact in person onscreen, even if it was just to handle an emergency.

This episode was also the first time Abby interacted with police officer Athena (Angela Bassett) and other members of the first response team.

9-1-1 airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on Fox.