Beware: Sinkholes are swallowing Hollywood

Right now, Hollywood minds seem to be filled with sinkholes. Consider:
— “Fire Country” (shown here) opens its season (9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, on CBS) with a sudden sinkhole gobbling up people and cars during a downtown festival.
— Six days later (8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, on ABC), “9-1-1” opens its season with a bigger sinkhole, swallowing Los Angeles neighborhoods.
— While those two were being planned, real-life sinkholes appeared nearby. One, in July, was in West Hollywood; another, in September, was in Malibu, causing Nicolas Cage’s driveway to collapse.
All of those, fictional and real, were dwarfed by previous fictional ones: In 2000, the cable film “On Hostile Ground” found sinkholes in New Orleans during Mardi Gras; in 2021, NBC’s “La Brea” saw a huge hole plummet people all the say down to … well, to about 10,000 BC.
So this is a TV natural. When Eric Guggenheim (of “Hawaii Five-0” and “Magnum P.I.”) took over “Fire Country” for this season, he was eager.
“When Eric came in, he was: ‘What about a sinkhole?” said Max Thieriot, the show’s producer and star, That “wasn’t something I’d really been thinking about, but it was a clever way to tie in” the flood at the end of last season.
That sort of thing is one way a real-life sinkhole can form. The one in Cage’s driveway followed Malibu flooding; the one in West Hollywood followed the bursting of a century-old water pipe.
But others simply are geologic quirks. Lists show sinkholes worldwide; one in China is more than 2,000 feet deep. In the U.S.. most big ones are in the South … or in the minds of TV producers.
“It’s definitely something I was pushing for from the start,” Guggenheim said. It has “a lot of scope and a lot of scale …. We did build a sinkhole on our stage, (plus) visual effects that are just kind of mind-blowing.”
It was a way to involve lots of characters — including a new one who was traveling from Philadelphia. “She’s an urban firefighter and this is wildland,” Guggenheim said. It’s “is a whole different animal, culturally.”
Also helping is Dr. Camille Thurston, who turns the bar into a first-aid clinic. She’s played by Natalie Zea … who starred in “La Brea,” plunging into the past. Maybe she’s sinkhole-prone.