“Blue Bloods” is getting ready to conclude its long, storied network run — and presumably, it will leave at least some of the Reagan family with loose ends to tie up. Loose ends often signal that a show will be receiving a spin-off, but that’s one thing series showrunner Kevin Wade vows will never happen — mainly because the show is all about one family, and that chemistry is hard to replicate.
“‘Blue Bloods’ was never about the initials, whether it was ‘CSI’ or ‘NCIS’ or ‘FBI,’ it just isn’t; it’s about the family,” Wade told PopCulture.com in 2022. “You can’t replicate the family.” Noting that you can, of course, weave a whole show about a family of cops and lawyers and set it anywhere, Wade points out that the unique thing about “Blue Bloods” is the team of actors that lead the show. If you break them apart, he says, the zing that makes the drama special is lost. “That will be when the show ends one day, if somebody has an idea to take a couple of the characters and put them in a new situation, that would be great. But that’s in an unforeseeable future.”
Now that the series is edging closer to a definitive ending — though the show’s cast of closely-knit actors continue to stand opposed to it ending at Season 14, including Tom Selleck — a future where the Reagans might have to separate looms over everyone.
The themes of Blue Bloods revolve around family
Unsurprisingly, Kevin Wade told Newsday in February 2024 that the watchwords for Season 14 of “Blue Bloods” are morality and family. “Personal responsibility, a sense of fairness — that if you take a stand for one social or law enforcement side, then you build a soap box of equal dimensions for the other side,” he said. But additionally, they’re planning on forcing their characters into difficult situations. “We’ll be putting the main characters into conflicts that they could not genuinely walk back, and doing quite a bit of that, so that when they do resolve it, it strengthens [them] — you can’t build a monument then stand back and look at it.”
While this might not mesh with some fans’ takes on how Season 14 of “Blue Bloods” will wrap things up, at least the people at the helm of “Blue Bloods” know exactly how they want to bring the show back to port.