911 Ruined Its Running Gag With a Single Episode 

Summary:

• 911 was an original Fox procedural drama that was recently canceled and picked up by ABC instead.
• The show focuses on the day-to-day lives of Los Angeles first responders, covering their work cases as well as their personal lives.
• One of the running gags is a superstition surrounding the word “quiet.” However, in the episode "Animal Instincts," the rule is broken without any consequences.

Running gags are a great tool for writers to help create a sense of continuity within the show. This is especially true for those shows that have their own episodic subplots and can feel somewhat disconnected from one another. Both sitcoms and procedurals fall under the same umbrella in this sense.

While it's no big deal to write a running gag into a sitcom, and every classic show in a genre usually has plenty of them, it's harder to do with procedurals.

For Castle, for example, the running joke was Castle's crazy versions of events that happened. For Grey's Anatomy, depending on the season, the nicknames the interns give their residents.

For 911, it's about a superstition the team has worked out: if someone says "quiet," it gets very bad in a matter of seconds.

911: We Don’t Use The Q-Word

The history of the Q-word is highlighted in the episode Jinx (S4E6), when Ravi Panikkar, the newcomer to the firehouse, says that his training has been pretty quiet so far.

In a matter of seconds, the alarm sounds, and the entire team is sent off on another dangerous adventure. It's explained that the curse of the word is so strong that even when it's used in a conversation about something completely unrelated to work, it still brings the same trouble.

While the joke was funny, and superstitions like this one are quite common in the work environment of real-life first responders, 911 failed to keep it running without any inconsistencies.

Viewers, now truly convinced of the consequences of the word in the characters' lives, were very alarmed to hear the word used again in a discussion between Eddie and Hen. Ironically, it was Episode 4 of Season 6 that broke the curse. The rest of the episode passed... and nothing happened.

Though it's clear that this was probably a mistake that slipped through rounds and rounds of footage checks, some fans prefer to come up with an explanation for why the curse didn't work. Many believe that since Eddie was the one who was skeptical about the whole thing in the beginning, he is the one who is blocking the curse.

If you want to revisit any of the above episodes or any of your other 911 favorites, the show is available to stream on Hulu.