911 and its offspring, 911 Austin, are very guilty of this. First off, the emergencies that put the firefighters in danger and routinely injure and sometimes even kill them are pure cartoonish disaster porn in which the shows keep topping themselves with ever larger-scale and more outlandish events-- Earthquake! Wildfire! Tsunami! Volcano! Giant dust storm! Space alien attack! (ok, they haven’t done the last one…yet). One episode had a bus crash into an office building-- only it couldn’t be that simple, it was many stories up, sticking out of the glass windows and teetering (it had run off the edge of a raised freeway).
Then there are the various soap-opera style conflicts and problems with the firefighters and their loved ones off the job, all set to tear-jerker emo songs played in the background.