Each week, I take a look back at a pilot from the 2010-11 season, first reviewed on my blog during that season. This week, I am looking at one of the biggest success stories of that season: Blue Bloods!
The Details:
Premiered: September 24, 2010 on CBS
Starring: Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou and Tom Selleck
Created by: Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess
What I Thought Then:
"Blue Bloods is one of the most intriguing, classiest shows of the new fall season. The hybrid between family drama and cop procedural is woven together very well."
"The cast is first-rate - Selleck is a commanding presence as the police commissioner and Wahlberg was the star of the pilot."
"CBS would be wise to nurture this show."
"This is one worth coming back to."
What Others Said:
"If it pulls off what seems capable of doing, Blue Bloods should be both a good cop show and an evocative family drama." - Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
"Well cast and crisply executed, Blue Bloods offers the smallest of wrinkles on CBS' procedural formula, but it's enough to place the pilot a cut above most of the network's crime fare." - Brian Lowry, Variety
"If you call up your mom, and she's watching this, you can probably feel secure that she's in the safe hands of the Selleck 'stache and some veteran producers." - Emily St. James, AV Club
"A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday night television." - Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald
"Blue Bloods sounds good on paper. Yet despite its good cast and competent execution, this drama about a family of New York cops feels a bit perfunctory." - Maureen Ryan, Huffington Post
What I Think Now:
I'm such a sucker for the song "New York, New York" so that opening sequence which uses the song as an underscoring really gets me. I remember loving it in 2010 and loving it again over 15 years later. It was interesting to go back and watch the pilot to this show given that I watched much of the run but haven't revisited any episodes. Blue Bloods was a very steady show. There's very little that's different in the dynamics between the main characters in 2010 than there was by the time the series finale rolled around in 2024. While the political circumstances of policing have been all over the place in the last decade and a half in terms of public opinion, Blue Bloods was a show that was never flinched much - the highs were not all that high but the lows were certainly not very low. The actors, especially the main family, all seemed to have a good sense of their characters from the jump. The one that seemed a bit of an outlier was Bridget Moynahan. She was fine as an actress but the show didn't seem to quite know how to incorporate her and her different position working for the district attorney in the pilot. The case of the week was pretty standard. I don't remember how long they kept going with the story with Jamie (Will Estes) and the secrecy that involved his deceased older brother, but I don't think it was very long, which was probably a good idea. That was more mythology than Blue Bloods needed.
What Happened to the Show:
Blue Bloods was one of the biggest success stories of the 2010-11 season and it still has a presence on the CBS lineup with its spinoff Boston Blue starring Wahlberg and airing in the old Blue Bloods slot to keep the older demo happy. The original series, as I mentioned, was remarkably steady in every way. It received mostly positive reviews (70 on Metacritic) but then just settled in for a long, unobtrusive run. While some of the supporting characters changed, the core family members stayed with the series for the entire series. It spent almost its entire run on Fridays at 10pm aside from a very brief tryout on Wednesdays in its first season that didn't go all that well. By the time the show ended in December 2024, it had run for 293 episodes and was a staple on the network. The series was routinely mocked for being the oldest skewing show on TV and yes, it probably was your Grandma and Grandpa's favorite show. But so many of the shows from the 2010-11 season were gone and forgotten quickly. Running that long, even if it was mostly for the older folks, is an impressive feat and it deserves accolades for that even though it had a run that never got much attention from TV media and certainly not from awards. I got away from the series for a few of its early years but then came back and watched the rest of the run. It was a comfort, background show for me and Boston Blue doesn't quite hit the same notes as far as I'm concerned.
Final Episode: December 13, 2024
Episode Count: 293
Where to Watch: Currently streaming on Paramount+ and available on DVD
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