Blue Bloods‘ end truly begins this Friday at 10/9c, when the long-running CBS family/cop drama serves up the first of its eight final episodes.
In the episode “Life Sentence,” an allegation of jury tampering against Erin (played by Bridget Moynahan) intertwines with Danny and Baez’s (Donnie Wahlberg and Marisa Ramirez) homicide case and Eddie’s (Vanessa Ray) bond to a child murder witness. Elsewhere, Frank (Tom Selleck) clashes with his friend and confidant Archbishop Kearns (Stacy Keach) over the death penalty; and when Jamie’s (Will Estes) car is stolen, he joins forces with his nephew, Joe Hill (WIll Hochman), to recover it
TVLine in early September spoke with showrunner Kevin Wade about his plans for this farewell run, crafting December’s series finale and more; here is that (near-)complete Q&A.
TVLINE | Are you still getting emotional at moments, as you finish up the final episodes?
I’ll be honest with you. For the final-season DVD package, they did a very nice, 45-minute thing, following us around for the last episode and interviewing everyone including hair people, crew members…. Watching it was like watching a wonderful high school graduation ceremony and party at the beach. So I watched it, and it was bittersweet, I guess you would say, but lovely to just go, “Oh my, what a nice thing this is to have, a record of it.” It was great fun.
TVLINE | We have, what, eight episodes left?
Yes. We come on mid-October (Friday, Oct. 18 at 10/9c) and air the last one… I don’t know if the date’s the first or second Friday of December.
TVLINE | When and how was it decided where this final batch of 18 episodes would be split, or was that just purely CBS scheduling?
That was CBS scheduling. For most shows, they get [final season] orders of 10, 11, 12 episodes, and we kind of lobbied for more. They very nicely and wisely went back and talked amongst themselves and said, “You know what, we’ll order the full 18, and we’ll split the season.” So, instead of nine and nine, it became 10 and eight, which made sense because they ran out of real estate in the spring.
TVLINE | Have you ever had a series finale in mind? Have you ever said to yourself, “When the day comes, this needs to happen, and this needs to happen…?”
I mean, if you’re on for 14 years, at least four or five of those years, you started out a season thinking this could be the last one, just as a numbers game. So, I thought about it a lot, along with my colleagues, and [longtime executive producer] Siobhan Byrne O’Connor and I would talk about it a lot over the seasons.
Some I remembered, but I rewatched the series finales of great shows, going back to M*A*S*H and Cheers and even Mary Tyler Moore, certainly The Sopranos, Deadwood. I watched a lot of them for what they might have in common, and what they basically had in common, it seemed to me, if I boiled it down, is they did a great show. And in the last few minutes, they did some little pivot towards, “This is also the last show.”
That avoids the “We are now going to do a retrospective of how great we’ve been!,” because I think people tune in just to see a really good episode of the show that they loved. In the case of Blue Bloods, the season finales that worked best were where we found a crime or criminals or a situation for all the Reagans to work together. You know, separately but together. And we did that in this one. So, we have four different stories but all aimed at the solving or preventing the same crimes.
TVLINE | What is Frank Reagan’s arc during these final eight episodes?
For Frank, very specifically, the mayor (returning guest star Dylan Walsh) is in a certain jam, and so he says to Frank, “Here’s the keys [to the city], you drive.” The mayor is in a situation where he can’t do his job, and Frank takes it upon himself, almost personally, to find the person who put the mayor in that position. Frank is a man on a mission to find out who went after his boss.
TVLINE | Is Erin having any second thoughts about not throwing her hat into the [District Attorney] ring?
No. She kind of drove past that. We found a character reason where she went, “I’m good at what I do, I like what I do, and I can make a difference on the ground and on the street.” She will find herself in a position where, in conjunction with Steve Schirripa’s character, Anthony, she finds a way to really help solve the dilemma, the jeopardy, of the final episode.
TVLINE | Anything of note going on for Danny and Baez, or Jamie and Eddie?
Yes, but I can’t spoil the surprise. There is a welcome surprise for the audience with Jamie and Eddie, and Danny and Baez have a walk-off that I hope the audience… also finds to be a welcome surprise.
TVLINE | Any promotions or job changes?
No. It seemed to me to be kind of a fool’s errand to promise something that you, by definition, wouldn’t be delivering on. Putting somebody in a new job, but you’ll never see them again? No, we just had them do the jobs they’ve been doing all these years and doing then, hopefully, as well as they ever did them.
TVLINE | It sounds like you got Dylan Walsh back for a bit. Any other recurring characters showing up in these last eight?
Dylan is back in a major way. Peter Hermann, as Jack Boyle, is back in a significant way. Nicky (played by Sami Gayle) and both of the boys (Andrew Terraciano and Tony Terraciano as Sean and Jack) are back…. Also, Joe Hill (Will Hochman) is back and integral. We’re not just playing “the greatest hits,” but everybody that the audience loved and that we loved working with and thought contributed to terrific storytelling, we found a way to bring them in. So, it’s chock-full.
TVLINE | What about Jennifer Esposito or Lou Diamond Phillips? Or Lyle Lovett?
Jennifer is in the last run of episodes but not with us in the final episode. Again, we were cognizant of servicing all our favorite actors and characters, but first among equals, servicing our main characters and their partners. Whether it be, you know, Bob Clohessy (as Sid), Greg Jbara (Garrett), Abby Hawk (Abigail), all of them, we wanted to make sure everybody had real estate in that final story.
TVLINE | And what will fans be feeling at the end of that very final episode?
You know, I hope that they are pleased and satisfied. We tried to do all we could do, which is to put on the very best Blue Bloods episode that we can make, while knowing, obviously, that it’s the last one. We’re tipping our hat to 14 years of storytelling with these same characters and these same actors playing them. I haven’t been able to really look it up, but I think that must be some kind of record — 14 years with no significant [number of] cast changes, and with [nearly] everybody who was in the pilot at the family dinner table, on a Sunday afternoon, still there 14 years later.
