Review – Blue Bloods

Blue Bloods – CBS – 10:00/9:00pm Friday – USA

The thing about Blue Bloods is that this show will live a long and happy life no matter what anybody thinks about it. It debuted to great numbers for a show relegated to the Friday night death slot; numbers that towered over the debuts of CBS’s other Friday shows Medium and CSI: New York. At this point in time Blue Bloods is a hit – this time next week that may be a different story, but if most of the people who tuned into the premiere tune in again next week then there’s nothing we can do to stop Blue Bloods from living out five unnoticed seasons on Friday nights. The people demand a Tom Selleck/Donnie Wahlberg cop family saga and the people will get a Tom Selleck/Donnie Wahlberg cop family saga.

Tom Selleck plays Frank Reagan the head of the Reagan household and the New York City Police Commissioner. His father is Henry Reagan (Len Cariou), who lost his position as Police Chief because he couldn’t keep his opinions to himself. Donnie Wahlberg plays Frank’s eldest son Detective Danny Reagan, Will Estes (American Dreams, Reunion) plays Frank’s youngest son, new recruit Jamie Reagan. Bridget Moynahan plays Frank’s daughter Erin Reagan-Boyle who is an Assistant District Attorney. Frank also has another son but he died in the line of duty, possibly because he was investigating shady dealings going on inside of the Police Department.

Blue Bloods aims for gritty realism but lands somewhere in the realm of dicky doofiness. The main culprit is surprisingly not Selleck himself, who has a good screen presence as the Chief, but instead Wahlberg as Detective Danny a loose cannon type willing to do anything to solve a case. The case in the first episode was so easy to solve it’s surprising it didn’t come with a walkthrough; it’s not his detective skills that are questionable it’s just Danny’s interrogation methods that come under fire. Danny’s on the hunt for a paedophile and tracks him down thanks to a series of ridiculous coincidences, but once he’s got his man he proceeds to beat the crap out of him to find out where the kidnapped girl’s being kept.

So the theme of this week becomes ‘what lengths would go to solve a crime’ and the Reagan family discuss the various sides of this argument over Sunday dinner. You can see this becoming a weekly thing with Blue Bloods, like for example somebody planting evidence “you can’t plant evidence Danny.” “Oh yeah, Erin, what would you have done?” “Quit it both of you, we’re trying to have a nice family dinner.” There’s already a routine set-up for Blue Bloods to fall easily into and that’s part of the appeal of the show. It doesn’t work for me because Donnie Wahlberg is far too ridiculous as Det. Danny and the show has too strong a feeling of ‘everybody who aint no Reagan family cop is either a weirdo or a queer, ya hear.’ But you can see how this could be a show that’s always just a part of the television landscape for the next half decade.

Nobody needs to pay much attention to Blue Bloods but if it was late on a Friday night and there was nothing else on your remote could find its way back to Tom Selleck and co as they gruffly go about solving another crime of the week that somehow manages to have splashback effects on every family member. This isn’t remarkable television, but I’m not sure it wants to be. This is competent television and while I never want to see another episode I wouldn’t be surprised if four years from now I stumbled across Blue Bloods and found that it was still on television. This is that sort of show – the sort of show that is always just there, not trying to bother anybody, just trying to get the job done.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad