Some serials seem to grow stale with age, especially when they attempt to continue their “ripped from the headlines” approach to issues.
Blue Bloods, entering its eighth season in September, is not one of them.
While my wife and I discovered the series starring Tom Selleck as N.Y. City Police Commissioner Reagan after it had already been on television for a season or two, we found ourselves drawn in by the way that Reagan’s family makes each of the episodes personal. With a detective son, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), assistant District attorney daughter, Erin (Bridget Moynahan), and a beat cop son, Jaime (Will Estes), the commissioner’s perspective on things is multi-faceted (not to mention his retired commissioner father (Len Cariou) or the host of other regulars).
In the seventh season, the crew will tackle a diversity of issues like:
-when Lieutenant Gormley (Robert Clohessy) is beaten outside of his own home by a gang;
-when the attorney’s office, thanks to Robert Lewis (Michael Imperioli), comes after Danny about a previous case;
-when the family’s Catholicism and duty in police work come into conflict;
-when diplomatic immunity and immigration become conflicts of interest to police work;
-when the family runs up against political pressures from inside and outside the city that go against what they know needs done.
Blue Bloods is funny, sad, maddening, and poignant, often all in the same episode. One of my favorite things about the show remains that every episode includes ‘family dinner,’ a reminder that at the end of the day when the work piles up and the pressures mount, we still have each other.
Special features include forty-five minutes including “The Story of the Reagans,” “Anatomy of a Scene” from the first episode of the season, “The Greater Good,” the celebration of the 150th episode, “Shadow of a Doubt,” deleted scenes, and a gag reel.
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