After 14 seasons and 293 episodes on CBS, Blue Bloods’ Reagan family has offered its final salute and left the table, breaking up the Friday night dinner with NYPD Police Commission Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) and his family tradition for millions of viewers. (There was previously a mention of the potential of a spinoff over the summer, but nothing is known to be in development.)
Showrunner Kevin Wade, who’s been with the cop and prosecutor family show since its first episode, shares his thoughts with TV Insider about the last one. Among them: his favorite scene in the series farewell, which he co-wrote with Siobhan Byrne O’Connor including a final salute to the partner of Eddie Janko-Reagan (Vanessa Ray), murdered Officer Luis Badillo (Ian Quinlan), and a show-ending full of love for everyone in the Reagan clan.
Now that last drinks have been poured at Frank and Henry’s Sunday dinner table, what were the most moving moments for you in the finale?
Kevin Wade: The two scenes where all the Reagans are together. Those two scenes were special because collectively when we shot them, we knew that it was either the next-to-the-last or the last time that we would all be together doing this. One is a scene we weren’t used to playing—Officer Badillo’s dignified and very sad funeral—and the other a scene that we’ve had every week [Sunday dinner at the Brooklyn home of Frank and his father, retired PC Henry, played by Len Cariou. More than the usual Reagan clan supped: Jack (Tony Terraciano), the older son of Det. Danny (Donnie Wahlberg); Nicky (Sami Gayle), the daughter of ADA Erin (Bridget Moynahan) and her former husband Jack Boyle (Peter Hermann) who is present as well; and Frank’s recently discovered grandson Det. Joe Hill (Will Hochman) joined the group.]
There was a whole lot of love at that last supper including the news of an upcoming baby for Eddie and Sgt. Jamie (Will Estes), probable remarriage for ADA Erin and Jack—even though she didn’t spread the news just then—and somewhat surprisingly but for many fans happily, it seems a possible romance for Danny and Baez (Marisa Ramirez) is on its way! Can we talk about all that felicitous news?
Danny and Baez, I’m going to shout out to Siobhan, who wrote that story and I thought it was absolutely a beautiful way to open the book on that relationship, which was helped by the scene with Pop and Danny.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
That was lovely. So why didn’t Erin announce the remarriage at the table?
Well, she realized that she could be a really good sister-in-law by not stepping on Jamie and Eddie’s baby announcement.
She wasn’t changing her mind about Jack?
Absolutely not.
Was all that love always a plan for the series finale? Or was it recently mapped out because that’s the way the scripts were leading?
We’d often thought about Eddie having a child. It seemed like a natural progression from the chemistry that they had to their wedding. It was always in the cards that they’d think, “Let’s start a family before it’s too late.” But we went year to year for the last number of years not knowing if we were coming back. Because we would always find out close to the last minute, we didn’t want to paint ourselves into a corner that we either couldn’t dramatize or couldn’t get out of. So we’d sort of paint the horizon in a little bit and then filling in the details seemed like the way to do it—especially for Jamie and Eddie and for Erin and Jack, and certainly for Danny and Baez.
The motive behind the main crime story about the string of revenge murders that the returned gang leader Carlos Ramirez arranged turned out mostly to be about blaming Danny and Baez for having to leave his young daughter behind when he fled prosecution by leaving the country. So even though he was a terrible person, the basis of the hardened killer’s plan was about his love for his child. In the end, he surrendered to Danny so his daughter could visit him in jail. That seemed a very Blue Bloods outcome—appealing to people’s better angels, even the really wicked.
Absolutely! There’s a line Jamie says when they’re looking for one of Carlos’ shooters who just became a father, Jam, “Even bad guys may want to see their newborns.” And he did. You may be a bad guy because you do bad things, but are you a bad guy through and through, or do you have the normal emotions that the rest of us have?
Blue Bloods, to me, always seems to be aspirational: It’s not all blue skies, but there is always a kind of decency and a hope to do their best in the major characters, whether they’re cops, DAs, or even NYC mayors.
I think so. The people around the family dinner table particularly exemplify a certain kind of loneliness, a sense of being married to the job, and a sense of service being your purpose in life. I think that lines up with who they actually are.
In the end, there was no sense of any romance in the commissioner’s life. Tom Selleck had actually indicated to me that Frank should be alone at the series finish. Did he ever tell you that? [He had shared with TVI at one time he thought more flirting would have been nice.]
We didn’t discuss it much. The bar would be pretty high to be able to make a good Frank Reagan police commissioner story out of him dating. We tried it a couple of times with some success, but it wasn’t an area we visited a lot. He didn’t have a romance with Det. Baker [Abigail Hawk], but if this was a 1940s comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant, Baker would be Gal Friday.
It’s a shame she was married. But scenes with his always amusing trio of advisors (Abigail Baker, Robert Clohessy’s Lt. Sid Gormley, and Gregory Jbara’s Public Information Deputy Garrett Moore) helped humanize Frank as a powerful commissioner. Do you agree?
We called them the Dream Team—but they were anything but… [Laughs] But they were a wonderful work family for him. So we didn’t give him a wife or a girlfriend but we gave him a blood family and a work family.
On a sadder note, why did you decide to kill off Eddie’s partner Badillo in the finale?
Let’s work backward. We didn’t see any value for the audience or the legacy of the show in killing off one of the Reagans. It wasn’t that kind of show. I don’t think people were going to go, “Thank God, Henry had a heart attack.” Or “Good, Danny would get shot and killed.” But we did have to sacrifice somebody, It affected Eddie very strongly, so that was important. So when it was decided, I got with Ian and Vanessa, and said, “Look guys, Badillo is going to die, but there will be great scenes for both Eddie and Badillo.” I wanted to get ahead of it, and then in sharing it with him, I said, “It’s good news: Your character dies and you’ll get all this attention.”
CBS
Was there anyone you would have loved to have in the finale, but you just couldn’t fit in?
That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have a good answer. But certainly Stacy Keach’s Archbishop Kerns. There are a lot of people that if we had a very special two-hour Blue Bloods, I would have loved to have him involved in this, but we did the best we could in our usual 43 minutes and five seconds.
You must have been there for the episode’s filming, correct?
I was there for all of it. Siobhan and I both wrote so we were there. For the life of the show, the episode’s writers were always on the set for all the shooting of the show.
How was the mood in the final scene? I was told that it was quite emotional for the cast and the crew and there were lots of tears! During Frank’s final dinner speech, it sure looked like Tom was choking up a little.
Absolutely. It was very emotional. We spent 14 years pretty much with our nose to the grindstone as one does, turning out episode after episode, week after week, and year after year. Rarely do we look at the scoreboard; there’s too much work to do. We spent more time with each other on the show than we spent with our friends and family. When we did those two final scenes—and I think it goes for everybody in front of and behind the camera—we took a moment and went, ”Oh my gosh, this has been a long, long road and a very satisfying one.” It was an extremely unique and blessed thing to be a part of.
Though you certainly may go on to do more shows in the future, do you believe that the viewers’ love for Blue Bloods’ Reagan family would be difficult to replicate?
I don’t know if it can be repeated, especially with that weekly Sunday dinner scene that happened in the show every week from the pilot!
